In the Meantime
by ollie-craft
Summary: The sleep curse had snuffed Elena out like a candle, all those years ago. For a while, Stefan and Damon had tried to prevent too much from changing; thought loving again would be a betrayal. Now that Elena's finally waking up, can she live with all the enemies that arose and hearts that changed... in the meantime? Stelena/Delena/Bamon
1. Prologue Not Nearly Long Enough

**Author's Note:** This story was inspired by my wondering about what the experience of the sleep curse would really be like. How would it feel to "wake up" after an unknown interval of time to find your world and the people you loved very much changed? I decided to write from an "ensemble" perspective so that Elena, who's still the center of the story, can show up in the context of everyone else's lives; after all, Bonnie, Damon, Stefan, and Caroline didn't spend the time Elena was gone just sitting on their hands. They and their old and new friends have had experiences that make them see Elena Gilbert differently than she sees herself.

In showing these changes, I wanted to be true to the feel of the Vampire Diaries' universe—to show that epic drama continued to pile up at the same rate that it had when Elena was awake, like a relentless storm with just an occasional eye. Like Elena, I hope, readers will find themselves reeling a bit as they "catch up" with the magnitude of some of the changes in their lives in the first few chapters. (Because of the need to explain what happened "in the meantime" of Elena's time lapse, there's a lot of world-building here in the first four chapters, and then it really gets going.)

Thanks for clicking through this far.

Your vampire-loving friend,

Ollie

* * *

… _And soon, my friend,  
_ _We shall have no time for dances.  
_ _We are dying, Egypt, dying  
_ _And not expecting pardon;  
_ _Hardened in heart anew;  
_ _But glad to have sat under  
_ _Thunder and rain with you._

-Louis Macneice, from "Sunlight On the Garden"

* * *

 **Prologue. "Not Nearly Long Enough"**

Bonnie knew where she was when she blinked, and the forest she'd been standing in became the Salvatore house—and blinked again, and the boarding house became an antebellum ballroom, crowded with hoopskirts. It didn't smell right; it should have smelled of close bodies and stale sweat, the remains of dinner, tobacco and booze wafting a bit too freely. Instead it smelled, only faintly, of mint and magnolia. There were, Bonnie judged swiftly, no slaves, no elderly people, no children. The colors were too hot, too modern, the darts on the walls more Baz Luhrman than Jefferson Davis.

It was not an antebellum ball.

It was a 21st century fantasy of an antebellum ball.

 _Dear Lord._ It was a dream.

"Elena!" The last times Bonnie had been here, in Elena's dreams, she'd been careful, embarrassed to intrude on her friends' privacy. Now, though, there was no time for any of that. "Elena—where are you?"

The crowds hushed and the violinists quit, as Elena ceased imagining their chatter and strumming. And then everyone dissolved between them, and there Elena was, in the purple silk and crinoline she'd worn to Alaric's wedding so long ago. She was flanked on either side by Stefan and Damon. Well. Dream Stefan and Dream Damon. _Of course. Oh, Elena._

"…Bonnie?" her friend said faintly, finally.

The room lurched, and the ballroom and the ball gowns and both Salvatores disappeared. And they were all alone in Elena's dream of an empty mansion she had never seen and which had burned down a hundred years before her parents had been born. And Bonnie's heart started to hurt for someone other than herself-to see Elena, her mind stuck in an endless loop of saving Salvatores and of coming to understand them.

"What… how…?" Elena blinked, rapidly. "I'm sorry, Bon. Everything I think about too hard just sort of… dissolves around me." She grabbed her friend's hands. "Don't go."

"I won't. Elena… God. I can't do this again." She heaved a steadying breath, tried to focus on the most important things. "It's time, girl. You have to go back."

Elena's hands, clutching Bonnie's, turned to ice. "No," she whispered.

"Tell them—it's already happened. OK? Now you have to carry it for me."

"I thought you would break the curse." Elena was whispering, but even that was loud in these too-large hallways. Bonnie could feel very fine tremor in Elena's hands. "Well—not you, or we'd both be dead. But that you'd find a way. Deep down. I thought I'd see you again in time for my 21st birthday. Is it… how long has it been?"

Bonnie shook her head. She couldn't break that news, couldn't bear it. "Not nearly long enough." She squeezed Elena's hands, hard. "There's no time here, either. I just want you to know—I love him. So much. That's why I did it. And I thought… this way, we could both have our pieces of eternity." She resisted the part of her that wanted to apologize; damn, but she'd thought she'd had that beat. "When you wake up…" she choked on a lump growing out of control in her throat. "When you wake up—go to the Estate, OK? They're gonna attack it again, but they'll retreat once they know you're there. That rock is no match for this sleep curse."

Elena's eyes were wide, a little frantic. "I don't know what you're talking about, Bonnie. Who's 'they'? What rock? What's the Estate?" Then she shook her head frantically. "No, no. Just tell me that everyone's OK. And tell me that you loved your life, that you were happy, Bonnie, please!"

And then Bonnie felt herself flicker, and knew she was being pulled beyond this plane. Though she knew it was futile, she grabbed harder at Elena's hands even as she dissolved. She was frustrated to hear her own words come out muffled.

"…important…tell Iris…don't touch…"

And then she was swept on to the next place.

It was very dark; there was just one pinpoint of light, almost out of the realm of the visible. And the voices. So many voices, whispering, laughing, screaming, crying, like an auditory museum of intense human feeling.

Bonnie had suffered worse places. Well, at least as bad. So she didn't waste any time starting another search—this time for her ancestors. For the friends she'd lost. She began to call for them every way she knew how.

Though the little light flickered, she didn't think anyone actually heard her.

And damn it. There it was again, bubbling up again. The guilt she thought she'd succeeding in smothering half as many years ago as her best friend had been gone, had started smothering almost from the moment she had sealed Elena's unaging, ever-dreaming form into the Salvatore crypt. Back when they'd all still been children. Albeit children who'd been robbed of innocence again and again.

 _I'm so sorry, Elena. Because… everything changed in the meantime._


	2. Chapter 1 The Enemy of All Deals

… _This is an old story,_

 _with its old beginning,_

 _as I lay me down to sleep._

 _But when I wake up, sunlight_

 _has taken over the room…_

 _Whatever was bound to happen_

 _in my story did not happen._

 _But I know there are rules that cannot be broken._

 _Perhaps a name was changed._

 _A small mistake. Perhaps_

 _a woman I do not know_

 _is facing the day with the heavy heart_

 _that, by all rights, should have been mine._

—Lisel Mueller, from "In November"

 _ **Chapter 1. "The Enemy of All Deals"**_

Elena's hand landed on her heart as her eyes flew open, as though she knew that heart needed protecting, as though she could protect it from the outside. She said a word that had been on the tip of her tongue for a number of days—years, decades—she didn't yet know.

"Bonnie."

Her eyes flooded and teeth gritted against it. _You knew it was goodbye. You've been dreaming of this goodbye for…_

She had no idea how long, actually.

As she sat up, she sensed a number of things all at once. Creaks in all of her joints, for one, and she kind of needed to pee; this was no fairytale. A musty smell coming, she supposed, from her clothes, which had suffered some long interval of light and oxygen. A chain around her neck—her vervane pendant, made heavier, she saw, by an old wrought-iron key, which looked as though it would open something like the garden gate at the Lockwood mansion back when it was first built.

And a piece of paper, which had fallen off her lap. Had fallen onto the _coffin_ beneath her, actually.

Damn all vampires. She'd been _dreaming._ Couldn't they have just left her in a bed, for crying out loud? No, they'd put her not only into a coffin, but into this _sleeveless_ blue dress she'd never even seen before. She cringed to think who had put it on her prone body. And _then_ it had been June, but _now_ it was… well, whenever it was, it was cold. And the stones in this crypt held in the damp.

The note was in Bonnie's handwriting. She blinked back tears again. "I'm about to spell you inside this crypt, girl," said her friend's faded blue ink, "but I'm leaving you a key to a trunk out in the antechamber, where we can still get in without endangering you. We'll leave you some clothes, send in some updated supplies once in a while. And all those notes and photos and pictures that you asked for, we'll leave those for you, too. No matter what happens to world outside, they'll be safe in here. You'll get these years back the best I can manage. I promise. All my love," and it was signed with just a slashing B.

Now she was crying in earnest. "This is not your time to mourn yet, Elena," she muttered to herself, and winced to hear how her voice, long unwetted and unused, croaked. She pushed that aside. "Mourn with your friends. Once you know they're alright."

 _Bonnie. Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie._ She already knew one of them, at least, was definitely not all right. The tears fell faster, but she was hoisting herself out of the casket now. It wasn't her first time getting out of one; she'd found the spring to lift the lower half lid from above her legs easily, this time.

 _You can mourn once you know_ who's _alright,_ she thought.

Knowing it was ridiculous, she felt her non-existent pockets for a cellphone. _And how exactly were they going to keep that charged, Elena? Bonnie's magic is not compatible with Steve Jobs'. And God only knows how long it's been, if cell phones are still a thing, if they still happen through towers and satellites, if there are any functioning satellites left…_

Anyone who was watching would have seen her take four deep breaths.

The bottom of her coffin, though empty of cell phones, was not empty entirely. There were two more notes, tucked in on her sides. The one in her right, she saw as she pulled it out eagerly, was from Stefan. "Time is the enemy of all deals, especially this one, Elena—but it's an enemy you'll beat. If you're reading this, you already have. Come home. If I've managed to keep it from Ric and Damon, we'll open a bottle of '29 Dom and toast to Bonnie's life."

 _Come home._ Oh, Stefan—steady, sure Stefan. She believed him—believed he'd be waiting for her and would welcome her, no matter how long it had been, but the dryness of the paper, its weakness at the folds, told her it had been here a long time. It was an archival document—something he'd written a long time ago.

 _But Stefan never says things he doesn't mean._

And then, on her left, a short note from Damon, and she almost couldn't bear to read it. "Hope I'm there to wake you up with a kiss, Sleeping Beauty. But if not—don't you dare stop for any apples or dwarves."

She could see how much that breeziness must have cost him and felt some painful admixture—longing and regret and fear—surge within her.

Six deep breaths, this time. They'd left her three notes. One key to a trunk. All lying along with her in her lonely dream, keeping faith with her as the world spun on outside. She stepped gingerly out of the red-and-yellow stained glass light, the warm color at odds with that pronounced chill in the air. She shivered, hard. _A bed would have at least had a blanket_ , she thought, but told herself aloud, "Get over it, Elena. You need to see that trunk. Move."

Anyway, she already understood it. It hadn't been for her.

They'd put her in that coffin to help themselves make sense of the extreme degree to which she'd been gone.

Out in the antechamber, there it was as promised, centered on the right-hand wall, burnished black with matted silver adornments, aged with what looked like as many years as Damon and Stefan had been alive. When she saw the padlock, she understood the awkward shape and size of her key.

She stood looking at the trunk for a long moment. Of course she was afraid of what was inside. The answer to her questions—what year was it, and how much time had she lost? How many of her friends? And even if the living hadn't died, had any of the dead come back to life? Had they all moved on without her, to another town, other women, other problems that dwarfed her sleep coma? Was there still a country out there? Still vampires? It was Schroedinger's trunk, and the time between when she'd fallen into her sleep and when she'd awoken was in there, and it could be any time, and the time could contain any number of tragedies, and once she opened it, _something_ would be true. Terribly, irrevocably true.

She looked at the door to the crypt, and back to the lid of the trunk, and realized that the whole world was the same kind of box. At least opening the trunk would mean she didn't yet have to step outside. That was something.

A small blue light flared within the keyhole when the key was applied, and the top opened of its own volition. On its inside lid, crudely carved, three words: "DAMON WAS HERE." He might have been terrible at carving—or it was hard to carve a magical trunk—or else he'd just been drunk. She wondered if he'd "been here" one time or one thousand. Either way, it wouldn't tell her anything about whether he'd waited for her. His ways of leaving a proverbial hall lamp burning for her were bound to be unorthodox. If he'd done it at all.

She set the train of thought aside firmly.

She was getting good at that, since waking.

 _First things first._ On top, necessities: underwear, deodorant, and yes, a water bottle. _Thank God_. And then three sets of clothing—a formal dress in green silk, shorts and a t-shirt, jeans and a sweater, all cut or patterned in ways she found a bit ugly, though she smiled to see on top that Caroline had jotted out a note that said "Trust me!" with two underlines. There were matching shoes, and they were odd, too—bulky and old-fashioned, not in a way that Elena found hip. It was then the point caught up with her and she swallowed. Time had passed, then; fashions had changed. Noticeably.

And then again: _What would I even do with a formal dress coming out of a crypt, Caroline?_

At least, whatever year it was, people were still wearing jeans. She opted for them and the red top with its white cardigan, and changed all of her clothes mechanically, a bit of a taste of ash in her mouth even after she swallowed the water with gratitude.

Now her pulse was leaping around in her throat and wrists, and she was glad that there were no Salvatores around to hear it. She could just about hear it herself. She wanted to be brave enough that her knees didn't shake as she lowered herself onto them in front of the trunk. She willed it. She almost won.

Beneath the clothes, the trunk was only about a third full. Looking down into it, she had no idea where to begin, so she pulled out an item at random.

As soon as she saw what it was, she closed it again.

An album of postcards, tucked into plastic sleeves, all from Bonnie. Making herself open it again, Elena saw the first dated about two weeks after she had fallen into the dream, in the summer of 2015, from Bamako, Mali, the next a month later, from Cairo. Skimming pages frantically, she saw notes from Tibet and Mecca and Jerusalem, Helsinki and Melbourne and Machu Picchu. The notes were all upbeat—what she was learning, whom she was meeting, what she'd loved eating and what languages were rolling all around her. They all ended the same way.

"Wish you were here."

Elena was no longer bothering to hold back the tears. The last of these postcards was dated— _oh, God_. February 9th, 2022, and had a note about how she was leaving the vagabond life and coming home to Mystic Falls. Only seven years after she'd gone to sleep.

 _Not nearly long enough, Bon._

Now Elena was opening the rest frantically. There was a manila folder with Matt's name on it, with fourteen audiotapes inside. She set those aside but was so grateful to know he'd recorded his thoughts for her. A cigar box had a note from Tyler in it that just said "for the welcome back party" that made Elena laugh. Jeremy, she saw, had left her a book of sketches, a mix of fanciful scenes of exaggerated vampires and comical mortals, and pictures of people she knew. The first one of those hit her hard. Damon and Stefan, sitting by a fire at the Salvatore house, leaning shoulder to shoulder.

She'd wanted so badly to know they'd be there for each other.

The bottom of the trunk was taken up almost entirely by sets of volumes. On the left, photograph albums, with Caroline's neat handwriting labeling the occasions, some of which she didn't understand: "Groundbreakings at the Estate"; "High Stakes"; "Tyler's 30th birthday"; "New Year's Eves"; "Welcome, Lennie!"

 _Tyler's 30_ _th_ _birthday._

There was real dread, now. These photo albums seemed to contain the danger of what she had learned at Whitmore to call social death; the danger of all the time and memories she'd lost and could never regain, the danger of being alienated from it all permanently.

But then. On the other side. Pure comfort. The thing Elena had most wanted to see without knowing she was hoping for it.

Stacks of Stefan's journals.

She opened the top one to see an entry dated just one day after Alaric and Jo's disastrous wedding.

 _Elena,_

 _You told us in the dream that you wanted us to "write it all down," to keep track of what happens here, and that seems more my strength and habit than the others'. I'm relieved you asked for something. It feels so much better to think that there's something I can give you at the end of all this…_

The entry told her about the selection of this very trunk—apparently a matter of some controversy, as Stefan explained wryly. While Bonnie and Caroline had warred between magic and design considerations, Damon, impatient for the protection spell to seal her in, threatened both of their lives with increasing hostility. He'd then dragged out of the attic a trunk he'd picked up while off on his Grand Tour, just before accepting a commission in the Confederate army. " _Damon was here"; was Abraham Lincoln president when you wrote those words?_ _Did they have anything to do with me at all?_

Stefan wrote, finally, about the pilgrimage of the Originals to see her before the crypt closed. And then about the sealing of her catacomb in a ceremony using blood from each of the Originals, so that the seal would keep vampires out as long as there were vampires left alive.

 _Elijah kissed your forehead before he left. I would rather he hadn't. I don't know how many more times I want to put my poor old body between Damon and an Original._

Elena sniffed a bit at that. Poor old body, indeed.

 _It was unsettling. What was once you has become just a body, a simple dreaming object that an Original could touch as he wanted, something that couldn't object. I'm downplaying the feeling; it frightened me, and I know Damon felt it, too, when he saw how vulnerable you were. I hate that you're alone in there where we can't visit you, but I'm glad we've made you as safe as we can. From everyone._

Elena looked up and shook her head. No one had been within fifteen feet of her in all that time. How lonely she must have seemed, when they'd thought of her. If they'd thought of her.

At the end of the entry, Stefan promised to write at least once a week, and flipping through that first notebook, she saw that, then at least, he'd usually written more frequently than that.

Steady, faithful, wise Stefan, who always listened to her, who spoke at length mostly to himself, in his journal. Or times like now, when there was nothing to hear.

She could bear it now. She dug for the brown leather journal at the bottom of the stack, flipped to its final pages.

The entry had a date, and it was the latest one she'd seen yet: September 30th, 2029.

She closed her eyes again, resisting the urge to pray—what would she pray to? At least now she knew this much about how much time had passed; it was, at the very earliest, late in 2029. She hoped it really was the fall or winter of 2029. If Stefan was alive, he would have kept writing, 2029 or 3029, that she knew.

"Please let him be alive," she whispered.

The last entry was long, and broken into sections. She smiled to see it. Oh, Stefan. Faithful, wise Stefan. He'd understood so well what she would need.

 _Elena,_

 _Just as in the last volumes, I'm assuming that if you stop at the trunk at all, that you'll skip to the end of whatever the last journal is. So I want you to know, first and foremost, that at the time of this writing, we're all doing fine. We're all alive, Elena. Take a deep breath._

 _Jeremy's up in Montreal just now, where he spends half the year with his French Canadian wife, and draws graphic novels about mortals and the magical beings who love them. Yes, I know—it's a lot to take in. He's married, Elena; in fact, he married a witch, and though it's safe to say she and Bonnie will never be best friends, they make daunting allies when the situation calls for it, as it often has. Oh, and you're an aunt; Jeremy and Ollie had a daughter two, almost three years ago, and they named her Helen Sommers Gilbert—Helen for you and for Ollie's sister, and Sommers for your mom and Aunt Jenna. They call her Lennie._

That explained "Welcome, Lennie!", at least, although it was so bewildering, so much all at once, that Elena had to look away. She reached for that album in Caroline's collection because she couldn't help herself, now. The first picture was of Jeremy pressing his face against that of a beautiful jet-haired woman in a hospital gown, the two of them staring down at the small red-faced bundle, a sprinkling of dark hair already on her head, in Ollie's arms. She flipped through to see pictures of Lennie with all of her friends. Lennie's first Christmas had lots of strangers in the background, but Matt, Caroline, Stefan, Damon, and Tyler were all there, too. One picture of Damon in a Santa hat, smiling and holding Lennie up against his forehead made Elena smile and think about what he must have felt, what Caroline had felt as she snapped the picture. If it was hard to see other people have children when they couldn't.

Funny that she'd never thought about it before.

In the pictures, Stefan and Caroline looked just the same—like they could pack up and head back to class for senior year. Damon, too, no older. Matt and Tyler and Jeremy looked… like their parents, almost.

The years had settled onto them. Elena shuddered just a little— _something just walked over my grave_ , she thought _—_ and then bent back to Stefan's journal.

 _Matt, who's the sheriff now, is recovering well from his injuries of last spring. He fell on the wrong side of a group of occultists who came to town and made our lives a living hell. (I don't recommend having groupies, but since I was one once—just ask Katherine—I might be biased. At least I was never wildly waving around magical weaponry in the town square.) He also lost his hearing for a few months last fall after Bonnie had to spell up a thunderstorm to repel a subculture of witches who call themselves the Alchemists and who turned up just before all hell broke loose. They're still around and still giving us problems. Long story there, too, if you look a book or two back. All unintended consequences aside, Matt's hearing is back thanks to a few forced tablespoons of my blood, which he finally accepted once he forgave Caroline for… well, never mind that now, either._

 _My writing doesn't lend itself to digests, apparently, even though I've been composing one of these for you every few months for fourteen years. I suppose I'm old enough that it takes longer than that to change my habits._

 _Alaric is… well, we take care of him the best we can. He's fine in body—the body of a vampire again, by the way, long story there again. But his luck in love hasn't changed, and that's a story that could fill several melancholy hours. I think sometimes he's held onto his humanity only through his fierce determination to protect the rest of us, Jeremy and Lennie especially. Family helps; I guess all of us have had our hearts broken more than once._

 _Ric's also been the architect of a lot of new protocols we have in place now—something much more like civil society. I wish you could have woken up before the war got here—we were really making progress in vampire-human relations. God willing, we'll do it all again, once this is over._

 _The war. But wait, no, I know who I'm talking to—friends first._

Elena rolled back on her heels and against the cool cobbled stone wall behind her, felt it snagging her sweater but didn't care.

She had missed a war. An entire war.

 _Caroline is… so very Caroline. She ran for mayor and won about six years ago, served a term as Mystic Falls' youngest-ever mayor (but not its only supernatural one, we learned to our shock once we had access to the town's secret archives). Now she's the co-chair of our joint council, humans and non-humans alike, as well as running her interior design business, among other revolving community projects. Her tremendous enthusiasm for life and her undauntable energy for the work of living well is unabated. It's also the lightning in my veins, the fact of the world that gives me the strength to keep carrying on. And yes. She and I were together, off and on but mostly on, for most of the first eleven years you were gone. I think we really learned together about how to love humanely and passionately. I would have thought we were each incapable of betrayal at the outset, but I've changed my mind about what betrayal is, instead. We are… suffice it to say that we love each other but are struggling to forgive each other._

 _God, Elena, I have so much to tell you. To ask you._

 _Bonnie. It's hard to write of her to you, as always, knowing what must be true if you're reading this. But she's been so strong, so relentlessly adventurous, our hero and savior so many times over. She spent the first years, six or seven of them after you were gone, trying to find loopholes in the prohibition of probing your binding with magic—she probed it with everything but magic instead, traveling the world to learn from every kind of witch and to plumb every form of non-magical ancient wisdom she could think of. That's how she brought the Oracle to us—Iris, now among our dearest friends—and Iris is why the war came to Mystic Falls. It started at a meeting of the vampire clans we called out at the Estate._

 _The Estate, by the way, is where you should come find us; our house is now integrated into a 200-acre compound which we've magically walled and maintain with our friends and allies, with housing and recreation and training grounds scattered around the site._

Aha. That explained the album "Groundbreaking at the Estate," then, and started to clarify Bonnie's exhortation in the dream to go there first.

 _In the middle of the conclave, Iris had a vision, a vision of_ you _. She let slip at a conclave of a hundred vampires that the cure for vampirism was here in Mystic Falls. Vampires flooded our town from all over the world, desperate to find you. Ollie spelled the whole crypt to the Other Side for a while, and then she invisibilized it in holy places around the world—in Tibet, at Mecca, Jerusalem, Machu Picchu, combining her own powers with the other kinds of magic stored at those sites. I don't mind telling you—because it all worked out just fine—that she nearly died to save the sister-in-law she'd never met, and more than once. But finally, you were discovered one too many times. She brought the catacomb back to town, and the Originals guarded your body from all sides while we, all of us, fought a great battle against those who wanted to use you up and those who wanted to destroy you and the cure with you. That big battle happened last winter. Many vampires died._

 _Quite a few of them were our own allies, people who'd become our friends. You'll want to read about them someday. I wrote about it all when the killings were still happening daily and the grief was so fresh that I almost want to ask you not to read that volume. Not ever._

 _Elena, you chose none of this—not to be the source of the cure, not to fight about it nor how to fight about it. There can be no guilt about any of this, not from you. In fact, one of the few things that kept us going through those weeks was the idea that you were peacefully dreaming through it all. There are still occasional attacks and our little clan has found itself swept up in the political currents of something like a vampire civil war. But it has helped so much that we knew that we were winning because you were safe, and were winning, too, because it was_ you _who we saved._

 _But brace yourself, Elena. The town has been brought low, and though there's been an armistice, no one is quite sure the war won't come back here. If you find yourself passing through town on your way to find us, it won't be as you remember it._

 _You'll have seen that there's one name I haven't mentioned. Damon's. He and I have been pursuing a project, war-related, for the last two years that involves a great deal of travel. We've set up alliances, established some systems whereby people might appeal to you for a cure—only if you're willing—once you wake up. And we're working on eliminating those threats that we have to._

 _As I'm writing, he's in Osaka, Japan. I got a text from him this morning that said, and I quote, "Remember that old proverb, 'Never sign a blood contract with Japanese hybrid vampire-fairies once you're past your fourth cup of sake'? Why do you never remind me of common folk wisdom, brother?" The lack of distress emojis told me he was fine, if hungover._

 _In the first years of your absence, he was in turns been furious, melancholy, euphoric, and unnaturally calm, sometimes with the heights of one emotion lasting months, sometimes all chasing around after each other inside one evening at home. I will let him be the one to tell you about how he came out the other side, but I will say this: as much as your loving him was the making of him, your absence has been the solidification of the man you made. There have been bad days, Elena, and very bad mistakes—by all of us. And there have been changes. I cannot say that any of us has kept faith with you perfectly, because honestly, there were too many threats, and they came too many ways. But most days, my brother is his best self cast in bronze._

 _Honesty demands that I add that his best self is still an ass._

 _Now you can get of that crypt with a little less mystery, Elena. One last thing: when you step outside, someone will be there, an Original. Don't be afraid. They serve as a rotating guard. It's part of the armistice. The part that threatens their lives, of course; the only inducement they recognize._

 _Elena. I have missed you unbearably. Come home and tell me what you dreamed of._

 _With love always,_

 _Stefan_

War and grief and family and plans and changes. All the things he hadn't had space to tell her had been glaring on the page—hints about long-standing wounds, about new commitments. About Damon moving on, if she was understanding his quiet implication. Fourteen years. It seemed so real once he tried to wedge it into the last four pages of a bound journal in his small, old-fashioned script.

Fourteen years. It had at least been fourteen years. Three times as long as she'd even known Damon and Stefan. She had given Bonnie that much time.

 _Not long enough. But what could have been?_

Elena put the last journal back in the trunk and grabbed the first one, along with Caroline's "New Year's" album, and slid them into the satchel they'd put aside for her. She carefully placed all the mementoes back in the trunk and withdrew the magical key from its lock. When she stood up, her legs were steady beneath her. The light was still hard to read through stained glass, but she guessed it to be an afternoon in winter, with precious daylight fading away rapidly.

She didn't let her hand pause on the doorknob to the world outside, but shoved it open forcefully; she was ready, now, for the world and the war it had brought—that she had brought—to her friends. Yes: it was early winter, with its near-bare branches, the bite of frost on Virginia soil, and the smell of clean air stripped of all the smells of life, all its agents of change. And then Elena outright smiled when she saw who was standing, not languidly but as a soldier on guard and expecting a barrage—that most original of the Originals himself.

"Ah, Dorothy, you finally clicked your heels together. Or rather Bonnie did it for you," Klaus corrected himself without pause. "Sorry to torture the metaphor, darling, but I have some bad news about your yellow brick road. It seems to take an unfortunate detour right into hell."

She took in his sentinel posture and the way his eyes kept warily scanning the woods around them, his smirk. His familiar face. "Well, Scarecrow," she said finally, "I'm not gonna lie and say I missed you most of all."

"Honesty's always best, dear, but now there's no time for it. Since you haven't asked, I'll volunteer that it's December 4th, 2029. Your wicked little witch is trapped under a house and right now there aren't enough wizards and cowardly werewolves and heartless vampires to save her." Klaus had her by the arm already and was bustling her toward a car parked twenty yards away, low-slung and with a surface which, when she touched it, felt like more like tile than metal. So much had changed that this barely registered. "So it'll have to be you, and then back to beddie-bye."

Elena didn't blink at his implication that Bonnie might be saved.

She'd counted on it.

"Bonnie and Stefan said I should go to the Estate," she said serenely, just as though she weren't giving a name she knew about only from desperate dreams and magic trunks. Klaus, of course, didn't blink; it likely wasn't even the most surprising thing he'd heard all day. Or maybe the Estate had been around so long that he didn't even remember she shouldn't know about it.

"And so we shall, then. To the main house. There's no place like home, eh, especially the Salvatore's, now that yours is a bunker…"

Blocking out the rest of Klaus's stream of obscure observations and caustic questions, most of which he seemed to be answering himself, Elena leaned her head back against the passenger side car rest as it pulled back onto the main road.

Not to sleep—she had slept enough—but to turn her long dream into hard steel.


	3. Chapter 2 Work, Life, Balance

**Author's Note:** This story, as may be clear by now, was inspired by my wondering about what the experience of the sleep curse would really be like: that is, what it would be like to "wake up" after many years to find your world and the people you love inevitably very much changed. For myself, I wanted a chance to think about the possibility of the persistence of love in the face of time; what could it mean to _love_ people who have changed so much that you no longer _know_ them?

I was struck by how naive Elena seemed when she was saying her goodbyes at the end of "I'm Thinking of You All the While", how much she and everyone seemed to believe it would be relatively simple to pick up where she left off at the end of many decades of absence. And struck, too, by how hard it would have been to rebuild a functional social circle without her. In showing how much things changed on her in just 14 years of a sleep curse, I wanted to be true to the feel of the Vampire Diaries' universe—to show that epic drama continued to pile up at the same rate that it had when Elena was awake, some of which will be very important to this story, much of which I'll just hint at here and there. Like her, I hope, readers will find themselves reeling a bit as they "catch up" with the magnitude of some of those changes in this chapter and the two that follow, to see the characters having gotten chances to change that canon will never give them. And to get reflective about it in ways the CW would probably never allow, haha. (And then the fun *really* begins...)

Thanks for reading this far.

Your vampire-loving friend,

Ollie

* * *

 _And I had so much to tell her  
_ _before we die  
_ _about what I'd done all these years  
_ _in between, under, and around  
_ _truths like hers. Who knows  
_ _where we would have stopped?  
_ -Stephen Dunn, from "On the Way to Work"

* * *

 **Chapter 2. "Work, Life, Balance"**

Stefan's eyes were clear, if not his conscience, when he clasped the Oracle's hands in his. He had few enough secrets from Iris; she'd been his dear friend for about as long as he'd known her, his occasional lover ever since he'd left Caroline. There was nothing between them that wasn't easy. That fact had been a saving grace, since the war came.

"You don't have to stay here with Alaric, you know. You can come back to the main house with me," he told Iris for at least the fourth time in as many weeks. She looked so tired, her red curls hanging limply around her, even her freckles seeming to droop.

"It's easier to keep an eye on Alaric's nightmares when I'm on hand," she said evenly, or as evenly as her rolling Mississippi drawl would let her. Her power—her ability to see fragments of the future—came from being able to move in and out of the world of dreams at will. The future, she'd explained years ago, came to reality through that plane. Alaric's nightmares, which sometimes turned quite violent, were a special concern of hers. Something was hiding in there, she thought.

"Please. With your powers, you could do it from another continent without breaking a sweat, let alone from across town."

She rolled her eyes. "Then fine. Just because I sleep with you doesn't mean I have to shack up with you."

"Right—exactly. It doesn't have to mean anything. This can be simple. You showed me that. So you don't have to—"

"Then I'll stay here because Alaric needs me more," she interceded smoothly, "and because I prefer his company."

Stefan winced. Ric was a moody drunk on his good days. "Low blow," he murmured.

" _Alaric_ lets me envision him without trying to tell me how and where to live. So hush."

Stefan sighed again, but let himself be envisioned. It could take long minutes for Iris to peer around him in the dream plane, finding the stray scenes and symbols that clustered around him, waiting for them to accumulate, to make sense to her. Stray divinations sometimes came as a bolt from the blue, but usually it took her long periods of concentration. And this helped her—her subject staring into her bright, gray, infinite eyes, her almost-serious face with its permanent bare suggestion of a smile.

No wonder she had been his salvation. Well. A part of it, he amended to himself, thinking of the bound brown journal on his nightstand in which he wrote to a woman who was basically dead, and of long nights he and Damon had spent together in planes, trains, and automobiles, working to regain a brotherhood in motion which had once been lost in time.

Stefan kept his eyes trained on Iris's, but he let his mind travel idly around this room. They were down in the second subcellar of the Gilbert house, the second of six.

Above ground, the house that they'd had built where Grayson and Miranda Gilbert's had once stood had little in common with its predecessor. It was unassuming from the outside, at least by vampire standards—a squat, two-story brick colonial with white shutters and two modest columns holding up an awning above the front door, no porch because none of them really wanted to be reminded of the house that was gone.

It was a show of a house, a stage set for a play that was always running. It was up there that Alaric Saltzman was known to live, and sometimes poor, orphaned Jeremy Gilbert—who'd lost his _whole family_ , the neighbors would murmur to newcomers. Though they also would shake their heads and point out that grief had so addled them that they'd never even bothered to hang up anything on the walls upstairs. If you could imagine that.

Below ground, the real house, in the six sub-cellars about which the neighbors were blissfully unaware, it was a fortress, built to improve what Damon had caustically called their "sub-optimal work-life balance." They'd capitalized on the magic of this place—the sacrifices Elena had made here—to build a space to hold their growing cache of magical weapons, for holding clandestine meetings, for imprisoning enemy supernaturals away from the Salvatore house with its too-thin walls and labyrinthine hallways, or simply for surviving sieges which they had hoped, as they built down into the ground, would never actually come.

Last year, in a time of war, the rooms below the Gilbert house had become a well-located arsenal and rendezvous point which had saved all of their lives and many civilian lives in the town. _Location, location, location,_ Damon had offered, some midnight in the war weeks when they'd fought off a particularly nasty conclave of Estonian vampires through strategic retreat here.

Those vampires had been some of the first people to die here.

Back when they were first building it, they had only known that the sheriff was dead and that the number of covens and packs and hunters that blew through town never seemed to dwindle. They'd known that Elena was gone, and that the burntover lot where her house had been was like a wound that wouldn't heal.

And something else, for Stefan and for Bonnie. It had bothered them how often they found themselves in rickety old dungeons built to hold and punish American slaves. Some occasions called for brutality, as Stefan well knew, but those old slave barracks seemed to encourage it.

This one—these brightly lit underground chambers with their gleaming white stone walls, beamed ceilings, and spelled torches eternally burning, had more the appearance of an old tavern. It made them a little better. Checked them a little more.

Still, the balance never really came; there had been much more work than life in both the Salvatore house and here beneath the Gilbert's.

The Gilbert place wasn't the only one they'd reimagined and rebuilt. His brother hadn't much cared, but he'd signed on to building up the Estate around the their house as a functional place for them all to live—a cottage for Caroline tucked into the woods, a meetinghouse for Bonnie's one-time coven, a sprawling campground that Tyler had put up for his pack with his parents' money on the part of the grounds that butted up on Lockwood land.

Damon hadn't taken much of an interest in the layout, design, or occupancy of any of the outbuildings in the small supernatural village that had gradually taken shape around their house. Except, of course, the bar. When he was in town, he spent a lot of time at that bar.

On day three A.D. ("after dreamtime"—that was Damon again), his brother had taken to the wind, and for months Stefan had known where he was only as Bonnie reported it, as the two occasionally crossed paths along their different quests to find a way to lift the sleep curse. Even once Damon had started texting Stefan every day again, for a few years he had come to town only once or twice a season, to enlist his brother for some new mission or another, big or small. Find some old witch who knew about time travel so he could be with Elena, past or future, he didn't care—that had been early on. Later, extra muscle so he could protect her cousin from a loner vampire. A conciliator when he'd fallen on the wrong side of some Chilean dream goblins and was hauled in for a reckoning.

Right about the time Damon had started to settle in at home, to find equanimity, new purpose, and the beginnings of peace, the troubles had come. And then the war.

"Stefan." Iris's low tone pulled him out of his reverie. "Something has changed."

"What is it?"

"You know that lately, I've been seeing Elena more and more?"

Stefan kept not only his tone but his heart steady, knowing Iris could still feel his pulse in his thumbs. "You saw her again? What was she doing this time?"

Iris let go of his hands, pushed them gently away. She wanted that to be her whole answer, he could tell; when she finally spoke, she was looking down at the table. "She was _opening her eyes_."

Stefan's mind went blank. _Opening her eyes. Opening her eyes._ And so his muscle memory took over the job of fishing his cell phone out of his pocket when it started buzzing. It was Alaric, from upstairs.

 _Bonnie. Emergency. Get up here now._

He would have communicated the emergency with his panic, but Iris was halfway up the stairs. She already knew.

When it came, the oracle's foresight was perfect.

It was too damn bad it didn't always come.

Stefan's fingers blurred on the first part of his text message to his older brother.

 _Get home. Bonnie._

But then they faltered for a moment as he took in the crux, the magnitude, of what must be happening to the witch at the heart of their circle, at the heart of Damon's life.

 _Iris says Elena is waking up._

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )-(]**

Alaric had been having a bad day _before_ a coven of Alchemists had dumped Bonnie Bennett's unblinking, unbreathing body on his living room floor.

They were pretty much all bad days. This was now officially worst than most.

He saw the streak of Stefan fly to Bonnie's side and, as Alaric had when she'd first appeared, press his hands first to her neck, then over her lips to feel for breath, then slide to the peculiar stone lodged on bared skin in the middle of her abdomen.

He knew instinctively that this opaque stone, glistening an iridescent blue-grey, was magic. Dark, terrible magic.

"Let me summarize, Stefan. Callie here," he gestured to the witch in front of him, in a jean skirt and Chuck Taylors looking like a barista late for her shift at a local coffee exchange, "she tells me that Bonnie upset the order of the Alchemists when she destroyed their goldstones last week. So. They killed her."

Stefan was on his feet and at Alaric's side in an instant, the two of them together a large, blunt presence. His hand was on Callie's throat before anyone had time to blink twice. "She destroyed those stones to try to stop your _witch_ war from breaking out on top of this vampire war we already have in our town!"

Callie's face was mottled, but she just lifted her own hands and let the screeching sound within Stefan and Alaric's brains speak for itself. "As I said already, she's not dead."

Stefan's eyes narrowed on the Alchemist in front of him, a representative of a witch subculture that had done rather more unbalancing of nature than balancing in the last year. "We have evidence to the contrary." He glanced at Alaric, who raised an eloquent eyebrow. _Elena?_ Stefan nodded tersely.

"Bonnie's _not_ dead. Not exactly," Callie repeated insistently. "We've simply placed her under a Pegacite curse."

Stefan crossed his arms over his chest. _What the hell is Pegacite?_ God, what would Damon do with _this_ mess of a problem? "Go on," he said.

"The Pegacite," Callie flung out a finger with a touch of theatricality, "is that stone on her chest. The Alchemists have created it as a way of keeping order among witches. In that, the reputation of Alchemists speaks for itself; most of our spells work by amalgamation, transformation, or separation. This one… separates. It separates the activity of the body, what you call the soul, from the body itself." She paused carefully. "The body is literally in suspended animation; her heart is not beating, her brain not functioning, her lungs not drawing oxygen from the air. And the stone is now holding all that animation. Her animus—her soul, if you want." Another pause, this one more sly than thoughtful. "You cannot separate it from her; the stone will not let you. If I were you, I would also be very careful not to break it."

Alaric just raised a brow, years of dampening his emotions having left him as cold as any vampire Stefan Salvatore would be willing to share a drink with. "But how do we break the curse itself? She can't lie in suspended animation for eternity."

"And it would be a very serious mistake on your parts to imagine you can leave her like this."

Hearing Stefan's low growl, Iris finally spoke up from where she was kneeling beside Bonnie. "That is true," she murmured. She looked to Stefan. "It would be a mistake. Something has changed here, too. I see… I see a baby."

The surprise was such that Alaric, a man more laconic than most, let his jaw drop. "Baby… Bonnie's… is Bonnie pregnant?"

Stefan struggled to hold onto an expression of impassivity even as he took that news like a punch in the gut. _Bonnie, what have you done and how in hell did you manage to do it?_ And when it occurred to him that he already knew the answer, it felt like a second punch.

Iris kept calm, knowing eyes on Callie, even as she answered Alaric's question. "That is a fact between Bonnie and her medical practitioner, not her inert body and an oracle." She hovered her hand over that stone in the center of Bonnie's abdomen, seemed to think twice about resting her palm on it. "But there will be a child, I can say that." She looked at Stefan, sympathy coloring her tone. "I can also say that Bonnie Bennett is not dead. Or at least—she won't be."

Stefan led his head fall back. _So this is purgatory, then. Again._ But even before it had fallen it back forward, he had a knife from belt and it was wedged at Callie's ribs. "Tell us how to break the spell or pray that you can reach one of your sisters to heal you," he growled.

She trained her stare to his, affecting an indifference Stefan could tell by the sound of her palpitating heart was fake. Still, he could admit he was impressed at the poise in one so young. "It is a term of using the Pegacite that we must tell Bonnie's coven—in this case, you'll do—about how to break its power. Pegacite curses are attached to the completion of a specific task. The first Pegacite curse was lifted when one of my Alchemist sisters managed to turn straw to gold. She waited almost eight hundred years."

"What does Bonnie owe?" Alaric gritted.

A small, triumphant smile flitted across her mouth—just enough for Stefan to dig in the blade enough to pierce her clothing and to draw blood. He was gratified to see her flinch rob her of it. "Good news, given your diviner's revelation. She may awaken from the curse once she has a child. We need more witches in the Bennett line. Her line is essential to the balance we have held for ten thousand years and more."

Alaric jaw dropped again. "But—you just said—her _heart's_ not beating. She's not at what you might call peak maternal fitness."

Iris, sitting beside Bonnie and squeezing her hand, had also squeezed her own eyes closed.

"Indeed. If I were you, I would follow the model of the alchemists—amalgamate, separate. Transform. Bonnie's child will not come from her body." She shrugged. "But if there is no child, she will never wake up. And after a term of a few years, we will apply other… inducements… to her cousins." Callie threw up a hand and a blast of air hit Alaric and Stefan, holding them pinned in place as she reached for the front door. "Good luck, gentlemen."

"You better hope for the same for your sisters," Alaric offered mildly, his threat more intense for its lack of emphasis. "This is our town, our home, and _she_ is one of ours. I think you're about to find you've all officially outstayed your welcome."

But Callie just smirked at them and then let the door fall shut behind her. And then she was gone, and her holding spell gone, and the only thing stopping Stefan from speeding after her and plunging a knife into her retreating back was the threat of plunging his friends into yet another dangerous, unwinnable battle with these ruthless, relentless witches.

They had one unwinnable war going already. And anyway, Stefan never trusted his own first impulses. Now, in the silence, his brain was racing as fast as his body ever had at its swiftest, assimilating the life-changing information coming all at once.

"You said you see a child," he prompted Iris finally.

"Yeah," she said. "I do. What I didn't want to say in front of Callie—the child will be a vampire. And then a witch. It's very confusing." She shrugged helplessly, one accustomed but not inured to the pain of being able to see the future but seldom to change it. "I didn't see anything about how it's possible. Any of it. But I'll keep looking."

 _A vampire and then a witch?_ Stefan couldn't make sense of that. He kept sifting the more basic facts. "So she's not dead. You can't be dead and give birth to a child."

"Or else it all happens after we wake her up by a different means than Callie knows about. Or Iris could be reading it wrong," Alaric offered. "It could be another child in the Bennett bloodline—like a… a secret sister or one of her cousins and maybe Bonnie will adopt and raise it…"

Iris was shaking her head, so Stefan said what she was thinking and what he knew. "Iris is never wrong. Sometimes she's only half-right, but she's never wrong."

"Yeah, so I'm saying, what's the other half?" Alaric pressed on. "Who's the father? I mean, it can't be…" His eyes darted uneasily at what none of them wanted to say. "Even if it is, how and when did conception happen? Will the baby grow within her while she's under the Pegacite spell? If not her, then who, and how? And…" He cleared his throat guiltily. None of them wanted to state the question in the terms all of them hated to acknowledge.

"What does it all mean for Elena." Stefan didn't shy away from the question; he'd been turning it over for minutes that already felt like hours. What would this mean for the sleep curse? As long as Bonnie was alive, Elena would be asleep. But now her heart wasn't beating and her brain waves had stopped. Was Bonnie alive, or was Elena awake? The Alchemists had sealed up Bonnie's soul inside that stone in the middle of her torso. "They assured us that Bonnie is still totally within this realm—her soul and her body are both right in front of us, but they're just severed from each other."

"But what does _that_ mean? I mean, is Elena going to…?"

"I think Bonnie is basically dead—for now." Iris stroked Bonnie's arm while she said it. "When I first met her—her and Damon, on that beach in Thessalonika…." Iris was far from sexually innocent, as Stefan knew first-hand, but she still blushed to refer to the story, which made Stefan wince to imagine what she'd seen. "Almost first vision I saw was of her and another woman—Elena, I found out later—on two trains on the same line, one outbound and one inbound, set to pass each other on parallel lines that never intersected." She cleared her throat. "I think they have just passed each other. And I also think Elena will be knocking at your door at the Estate before very long. And so the two of you should prepare yourselves. And prepare Bonnie to stay… like this… a while."

Stefan had no idea how to prepare himself for such a moment, not in practical terms; in theory, he'd prepared each time he'd finished another journal and wrote a last entry to Elena catching her up on what to expect, thereby reminding himself, too, of how far they'd all come, of how much of it he thought she could handle.

When had he finished the last book? September, maybe? Damon had been in Japan. Jeremy had still been up in Montreal. Caroline and Tyler had been right here in town, and Matt had just finished physical therapy… Stefan sighed. It all seemed so long ago.

Not just since the end of summer. Since the moment when they'd sealed Elena in that inner chamber, when he'd last laid eyes on her. Fourteen years. So much hopeless water had gone under so many desperate, longing, impossible bridges.

"What does Bonnie need?" he heard Alaric ask, and forced himself to the situation at hand.

"We should take her down to one of the bedrooms on 6," he said, referring to the lowest and best-protected level of the Gilbert house, for which they'd never before found use. This was a first in a dozen ways. "It's the least vulnerable to surprise attacks. So here she stays." Stefan thought a moment. "And then I guess we should see about a welcome back dinner over at the house."

Iris let out a low laugh, obviously finding him ridiculous, and to Stefan's surprise, even Alaric shook his head. "Yeah, buddy…. this is one reunion I'm not going to crash. Tell Elena I'll see her first thing in the morning, once she's had a night of nice, normal sleep."

"And I'll see tomorrow, too—for a reading. To try to figure out what to do about the Pegacite." She rolled her eyes at those noble-sounding motives. "And because I've spent the last half-decade crazy curious about the woman missing in all of your lives who I know only from her own crazy dreams."

Stefan nodded, dimly registering gratitude that they were giving this to him, that he wouldn't have to do this with everyone else watching. "Breakfast at the main house, then," he offered.

Iris's eyes were shining with a light he couldn't quite read. She seemed almost… forlorn. "I'll clean up here while you guys take care of her," she gestured at the blanket which had been wrapped around Bonnie's body, and the usual detritus—glasses, liquor bottles—from Ric's day.

"Iris," he murmured. "We'll get Bonnie back. It'll all… it'll all go back. To normal."

She squeezed his arm—hard. "That's not what you want." She scowled. "Think about what _you_ want, Stefan."

He just shook his head. "Today's not the day."

"OK, honety. But… it never will be, at this rate." And she ducked his attempt to fold her close and kiss her forehead, scurrying off to the kitchen.

He and Ric made quick work of moving Bonnie down a bedroom on 6, covering her with a blanket even though she was neither cool nor warm to the touch and Stefan suspected it wouldn't make much difference to her either way. "Finally, a human I can hang out with and not have any desire to eat," he joked feebly.

Alaric sighed. "Too soon, buddy."

"Yeah. I know. I just… Christ, it's like there are two sleeping curses instead of just one, now. The first was already so…"

"Diabolical? Soul-crushing? A monumental dick move?"

"That about covers it. This one, though…"

"Yeah." Ric shook out Bonnie's comforter with all the expertise of a man who'd actually had the wife and three children Alaric Saltzman had always been meant to have. He smoothed it over her feet with competence as well as care. "I think we're about to figure out exactly to what extent our little clan negotiates with terrorists."

Stefan let his eyes trace over every curve of Bonnie's face, burning the image of her sleeping into his brain as a reminder that he wanted to fight this. He suspected it soon might be hard to remember. But he pivoted quickly from that problem.

"Damon's gonna lose his mind."

"Yep," Ric confirmed. "You gonna call him or shall I?"

"You know he doesn't carry his phone when he's out on a hunt. I texted him, though. Once he sees it, he won't lose any time, getting back to… them."

"Right." Alaric wiped a hand across his eyes. "You know about, what's it called, Sophie's choice?"

"Yeah. I hear you." _But_ _I don't want to._ "Damon's might be worse."

Stefan didn't let himself wonder about his own choices.

When it came to Elena, he'd only ever had one.


	4. Chapter 3 Proximate Eternities

_After an absence that was no one's fault  
_ _we are shy with each other,  
_ _and our words seem younger than we are,  
_ _as if we must return to the time we met  
_ _and work ourselves back to the present,  
_ _the way you never read a story  
_ _from the place you stopped  
_ _but always start each book all over again.  
_ -Linda Pastan, from "After an Absence"

* * *

 **Chapter 3. "Proximate Eternities"**

Elena was coming; it made Stefan see his house clearly for the first time in months. The Salvatore place, it seemed, was barely fit for habitation. The dining room table was covered over in maps, local and foreign; the maps were covered with X's; and the X's, Stefan knew, marked vampire kills, color-coded for ally and enemy, notated for the clan of the killer and the clan of the deceased. Sometimes notated with Damon's caustic comments, as with Adrian, a vampire Damon had cornered on the steps of the Mystic Falls Public Library. "The way to his heart was through his stomach," Damon had scrawled in tiny, gleeful print.

Meanwhile, the coffee table was covered in vervane and with the Gilbert serum, reconstituted in bottles, jewelry, guns, bombs. The surface of the bar wasn't much better; it was covered in half-empty liquor bottles and dozens of empty ones, never discarded.

"We really need to get a housekeeper I can remember to continually compel to forget everything she sees," Stefan muttered to himself. That, of course, was why he hadn't had one in years. Damon usually dragged someone in on his trips home, but it had been a while before he'd stayed more than a night or two. When Caroline had lived here with him, she'd run the house like well-oiled machine he was always in the way of, although she'd talked as though everything was in perpetual chaos. These days, for Stefan, it was easier to wash his own dishes every day than to be on hand to compel someone else to forget doing it. _I can do better_ , he told himself, even as he cleared the evidence of all of his other priorities.

He resisted the urge to shower and change his clothes, concentrated instead on ordering Thai food for delivery; he wasn't cooking, mainly because there was nothing in the house to cook, another sign that this place was more war council chambers than home. He moved the maps to Damon's desk and cleared the weapons out to the old barn they'd taken to calling "the citadel." In the last week of the onslaught on Mystic Falls, it was where townspeople had shown up, volunteering to give blood in exchange for protection from the vampire invaders who were tearing apart everyone and anyone in the way of Elena. They had protected them here.

Most of them.

Stefan sighed. He was dwelling on his regrets again, on the unchangeable.

He'd become quite proud of who he was again, these last years, and with Damon alongside him and their mother long gone, he'd become proud of his name, too. He was a Salvatore, and he and Damon defined what that meant in their world. In a time of immense pressure, he had only slipped once; his half-human diet was keeping him steady, powerful even, and he'd come to be a voice for both justice and compassion. This could work in the long haul. He could live with himself.

It was helping, this plan they'd worked out of hunting down the worst vampires, the bloodthirstiest, the ones who put Stefan's ripper days to shame, and allying themselves with the best. It was helping to create a stronger culture among vampires, that they were holding each other accountable for kills. It was helping Stefan, to work with his friends and his brother on something that meant so much—something that might keep Elena alive. "You know, normally I'd say, what's a little sociopathy as long as it's not in my backyard," Damon had said on the night before he'd set out on his first mission.

"And even then, if it's not in your living room…" Stefan knew his brother's extreme laissez-faire policy when it came to matters that didn't directly impinge on his comfort might never have waned, but for one woman sleeping in a crypt and her best friend expecting him to do the right thing.

Damon had smirked, but it faded quickly out of his eyes. "Our backyard has gotten pretty damn big in the last few years."

In this last year of hunting down their biggest threats, they had all learned to live with knowing that one of them was in danger but out of touch. It would be a disaster if their ongoing guerrilla war were traced back here, a disaster both for the ambassadorial part of their work, the end of all their alliances that were the rest of what was holding this fragile peace together. That meant, when they were on a hunt, they needed to hide, to wait, and to surprise. They didn't carry their own phones, or anything else that could identify them if they were captured. Radio silence during these missions had become, in this last year, a way of life.

It was a hell of a night for Damon to be unreachable, though.

The Thai food came with no sign of Elena; he went down to the street to meet the delivery driver, to compel him to forget the strange phenomenon of not being able to drive across a line of salt in the driveway. Then Stefan laid out three table settings, figuring he knew who was coming even though that jackass Klaus wasn't answering his phone. He had a drink. Had two. Had it only been twenty minutes since the food came? Twenty-two… twenty-seven…

Even as he made it out the door to his car, intending to go down to the crypt himself and make sure Niklaus hadn't gone off-script with his guard duty, he got a text from Iris saying, "Just give it one more minute, sugar."

The blessing and curse of the oracle in his life; she had no need for surveillance technology.

And then he could hear it: the sound of the end of an era.

It came as a low, steady hum trumpeting German engineering, wheels brushing the pavement around the curve on the Old Marsh Road, a low ticking signal into the drive. Maybe Stefan would wonder later that Klaus was a man who used his turn signal on an empty country lane. It would seem to him incongruous, even wrong.

For now, though, he froze.

"Elena," he whispered, and finally, it was real to him.

She had disappeared all at once, like the wind had blown her into that crypt, fourteen years ago. They had preserved her there, hoping that she would bring back the magic of all that lost time, all the pain of being without her, one day. For a while, they'd tried to preserve themselves with her, to prevent too much from changing, believing that giving into the temptations of time would itself be a form of betrayal. She would be gone a while, and they were resolved that nothing much would happen in the meantime.

It had been a long time since he'd thought that. Because, oh, the meantime had been hard. He had fallen in and out of and a little bit in love again, planned two different futures that would now never be, built a bunker, built a bar, saved what he could of his hometown and let go of what he couldn't save, and all the while he'd clasped hands with a circle of people sometimes held together by little more than that they all loved a girl who was cursed asleep. And like everyone else in it, he had treated that circle of clasped hands like his religion; the crypt where Elena slept as his holy mountain; the only constants in a long slough of time where every other thing had changed out of recognition.

So Elena's return, he'd long suspected, couldn't really save them, couldn't take them back. They'd built a whole community on the edifice of her absence. In being real and with them, she might well ruin them. Ruin him. Break hearts. Open wounds. Start another war.

The meantime was over. And God, but he wanted to see her, to touch her.

Now one kind of purgatory had ended, another was beginning. He had only this one minute to stand in its doorway and see both sides. He froze there, letting time press him from both directions, a vice which fixed the absolute present. He let it grip him. It was finally _now._

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )-(]**

Elena didn't have to wonder who was home when Klaus pulled up in the familiar old circular drive in front of the Salvatore house, ostentatiously pulling just past the line of salt that extended across the drive and then out east and west as far as she could see.

She didn't have it in her to wonder what spelled threshold she had just crossed. There was another magic here, an obvious one, because _there was Stefan_. In a navy jacket over a black sweater, as handsome as ever and looking stronger and wearier but not a minute older, leaning on an aqua Porsche convertible. It was a newer model than the one he'd fixed with Matt on a disastrous double date that had been, for him, she swiftly calculated, probably about exactly eighteen years ago, and for her, just about four. His arms were across his chest. He was holding himself perfectly, absolutely still.

Except his eyes, which widened as she got out of the car and he scanned her, up and down, down and up, up and down again, as though fighting for basic knowledge of her shape and form and bodily integrity.

And then his face broke open, and his arms with it, and she flew into them as he clutched her as tightly as she'd ever been held by anyone, crushed up against him like they were being wedged together by the heavy iron bookends of all the time gone. "So you did miss me," she said into his ear, but she was crying, too, and holding onto him as hard as she could manage.

He snorted. "Are you kidding? Once or twice, there were whole _hours_ when you didn't even cross my mind." He buried his face in her hair. "Now keep quiet a minute," he said, low. She wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to Klaus. But she didn't have any more words, anyway.

She breathed him in, let herself be in her body. God, but she needed this, too. Stefan's quintessential solidity. His comforting strength in those muscles she could feel gripped around her shoulders and pressing her back, could feel warm and taut against her, abdomen to abdomen and thigh to thigh. His steady breath, the old smell of the woods, of clean pine and wood smoke and cinnamon, all surrounding her, all transmitting what Stefan had always given her: pure loyalty, unconditional support, the most unflinching ally she'd ever have, a man at once perfectly constant and deeply dangerous. She felt it all leach through her skin and into her blood.

And she felt herself again.

"Alaric will be here in the morning," Stefan said into her hair. "Matt, too, and probably Tyler if Matt can track him down. Jeremy's getting a redeye from his comic book convention in Portland, and so's Caroline, from Bucharest. She'll compel herself a transatlantic flight back here the second she gets Vasile's signature on the bottom line. You should really call her because she's driving me nuts with texts and questions. I haven't heard from Damon yet but the second he gets my message he'll—"

"Yes, yes, travel miles and text messaging problems—you see, Elena, some things don't change—all quite fascinating, I'm sure," Klaus, leaning over the hood of his Audi, cut in, "but there are perhaps more pressing problems afoot, are there not? To the point—what did those deluded witch-devils say about the Pegacite?"

Stefan released her, then, and she let out her breath. Then, without thinking about it, she reached for his hand and gave it a hard squeeze. His answering squeeze told her he heard what she hadn't said— _thank you for putting what's left of my life back together for me_ —and he spoke instead to Klaus, more easily and with more forebearance than she'd expected.

"Come on inside, Nicky. If you're nice, you can stay for dinner."

He didn't let go of her hand.

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )-(]**

Just after dinner and Stefan's revelations about Bonnie and the new curse, Elena was tucked up on the couch in the Salvatore's great room, a fire crackling beside her. Stefan's first journal from the time she'd been gone was open on her lap. She had taken in the news about Bonnie's temporary death and an impossible child equably.

 _You have to tell them. It's already happened_ , Bonnie had said. _I'm so sorry. I loved him so much._

Elena needed more friends around her before she said out loud what she thought she already knew. More friends—and to look into one particular set of eyes. There were just a few questions left.

But the main one: how could she have imagined that no one and nothing would change in sixty years' time? She had been an idiot to be so serene. In less than a quarter of the time she'd expected to be gone, everything had already changed and the well of despair that those changes opened up inside her seemed not to have a bottom.

Well. Not Caroline Forbes, though. Caroline didn't change. They'd just gotten off the phone, where Caroline had bubbled over with questions and plans—"We are definitely hitting the mall next week. You need makeup. You need to be trained how to put it on, because you would not _believe_ how people are wearing eyeshadow now. I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't seen for myself. Oh, and you need wheels. Ask me someday to tell you how Matt wrecked your car—he swore me to secrecy, but I bet I can talk him around. We'll buy you a new one once I'm—"

"I don't need a car. Bonnie's coming back, Caroline," she said gently. "I'll do everything in my power to make it happen."

Caroline didn't hesitate. "I'm declaring a moratorium. Just for tonight, Elena, we're ignoring that she's double-cursed, that it's gonna be impossible to get her back, that you'll probably have to leave again once we beat the odds and do it. We're just planning a girl trip between two friends who haven't seen each other in fourteen _years_. We'll buy some cute day dresses. Catch up. Flirt with guys in the bar. And most definitely, we'll talk about how to save Bonnie. But not tonight." She could almost see Caroline shaking her head emphatically, thousands of miles away. "Not when I can't be there to cry with you."

It was Bonnie who switched her pace most easily between Caroline's swift, rushing one, and Elena's more plodding one. Bonnie would have known what Caroline needed without having to say anything. Bonnie, at the impossible heart of everything.

Elena did her best. "OK, Caroline." She swallowed. "Get here fast."

"If I could shake off these lecherous old Romanian vampires tonight, I would. I'm afraid it'll be late tomorrow night before I get in at Richmond."

"I'll wait up for you." Elena grinned. "With margaritas."

" _Awesome_. I'll see you then, Elena." There came a short pause. "Oh! Haven't gotten to say that in a long time."

They both had watery smiles, now. "I'll see you tomorrow," Elena managed.

And now she was staring at the cover of Stefan's first journal, wanting to open it but also wanting to savor it. The Stefan who'd written the words in here—and the people he'd written them about—they were the same as her. They'd just left her; nothing much had changed for them yet. She would still recognize them.

"I could tell you about it instead."

Elena looked up to see the vampire diarist easing up behind the couch. She patted the seat beside her. "I don't want you to have to tell it chronologically—you already did that once." She strummed the edges of the journal pages, then looked down at the couch beside her. Caroline's photo album, the one labeled "New Year's Eve". "Maybe look at this with me instead."

He smiled. "You got it." He threw an arm up behind her on the couch, wanting to be near her, not wanting to crowd her. "I think you'll like these."

She wasn't sure she could like any of this. But gamely, she opened Caroline's photo scrapbook. The first page was just a sketch of all of her friends, leaning together in 2016 goggles and festive hats on. Jeremy had signed it with a flourish at the bottom. There was a black cat walking through, which Jeremy had labeled "Baby New Year."

"Caroline got a cat a few weeks after you left," Stefan told her. "Named it Barnaby. He's around here somewhere, probably—has free run of the Estate. Barnie helped her manage her grief and anxiety. Her mom had just died, too, remember."

"I remember." She looked for a while at this artist's rendering and it was hard to believe it had ever happened. "You were all together that year?"

"Every year. We couldn't manage all the holidays in those days—we were scattered to the wind, and, you know, Tyler and Bonnie's aunts and cousins wanted to see them at Christmas and Thanksgiving…. But we were all in town that New Year's. We got together at your house."

"That's not my house." Elena hadn't seen what they'd built there yet, but she knew that much. "That's… something else, I think."

"Fair enough. Anyway, we got together at the bottom of the impossibly deep open pit where we'd started building a bunker beneath the site of your old house. To be precise."

She took that quietly. "You said before that Alaric lives there now?"

"And Iris. And Jeremy, when he's in town. That year, it was just a six-story-deep pit disguised by Bonnie to look like a regular basement dugout. When Matt suggested we spend New Year's down there, we realized it was perfect. The bottom of a very deep hole. It was a good metaphor for how the year had felt. Just… a big pit where you used to be." Stefan shook his head, and leaned down and flipped the page for her. "So, see, we built that bonfire and Tyler brought the keg. At midnight, none of us wanted to count down—none of us wanted to let go of the last year you'd been with us. So Caroline suggested we take a picture for you." He sounded, Elena thought, a little distant, like he was talking about someone else's life, as he pointed at the center of the frame; she couldn't tell if he was indifferent or if this way of narrating was his way of trying to make it easier for _her_. "We left you a spot right at the middle there."

Elena swallowed. There was that space, just big enough for one more person, between Matt and Bonnie. Most everyone in the picture was smiling—Jeremy, Tyler, Matt, and Caroline had managed it, and Alaric looked like he might just smile if he could remember how. But Bonnie had jerked a thumb at the open hole and was shaking her head at the camera. Stefan's gaze was off, a guarded thousand yard stare only vaguely in the direction of the photographer. And Damon was just outright glaring, his hands on his hips, his posture stating plainly he didn't want to be there.

"You and Caroline weren't together then?" Elena asked. Caroline was leaning onto Tyler's shoulder, and his arm around her waist was something other than casual.

"Nope. Not yet. She was a mess. I was a mess. We weren't compatible messes. We were great friends, though."

Elena turned the page, and the year flipped. "2017," she said. This year, they'd been at the Salvatore house. The whole house had been flooded with candles, all suspended high in the air.

"A trick Bonnie picked up in the Philippines that year. Caroline asked her to do it. We put her in charge of party planning. Obviously."

"Obviously."

This year, there were more action shots. Tyler and Jeremy shooting pool, Damon and Matt playing ping pong. Caroline had taken a picture of a small ping pong ball-sized crater in the wall of the rec room and affixed a little tag to it that said _Damon doesn't like to lose._ In fact, she'd captioned many of these. _Crisis photography: Bonnie tries to bake nachos_ ; _No one wins when Damon and Stefan arm wrestle_ ; _Ric drinks Tyler under the table. Literally_.

Elena was not sure what she was feeling as when ran her finger over a label that said _Foreshadowing Jeremy's New Year's resolution?_

"Yeah, I've got no memory of that one," Stefan admitted.

There was another group photo with an empty spot at the center this year. It looked easier, although Stefan was simply staring straight at the camera, and while Damon's hands had moved to his pockets, his expression was still hard and sharp. Caroline had labeled it _Missing You at Midnight, 2017_.

The years that followed were much the same, though the location flipped around. One year they had their party out in the cemetery. "We had to; Bonnie was casting a spell there that was warding off another ghost invasion and we couldn't have New Year's without her." In 2022, they'd celebrated in what looked to Elena like an empty bar, one she'd never seen. Per Stefan: "The Estate has a restaurant tavern at its edge, spelled so that mortals who leave automatically forget what happened there. We own it, me and Damon. High Stakes."

"Sure." Then Elena laughed. "Oh, you mean that's the actual 's probably the best-named vampire bar in the world."

Stefan grinned easily. "Damon's idea, of course. After the Grille first burned down—sorry, Elena, another long story there that involves a really bad vampire trying to call up actual dragons, total nightmare—we realized we wanted a place a little closer to home, where we could control how much vervane was pumping through the taps and so on. And I was hoping it would get Damon and Alaric to stop using our living room as a bar. No dice there, but I live in hope."

Elena laughed again. That year seemed more low-key—everyone draped all over each other, Caroline on Stefan, Tyler with a pretty girl, looked maybe Korean-American, whom Elena didn't know, Matt with their old high school classmate Laura Jack. In the back of a photo of Matt and Laura, there was something Elena had never thought she'd see—Bonnie, throwing her head back with laughter, and clutching Damon's arm for support. Her eyes narrowed as she took it in. She shot a glance at Stefan, read what he didn't say: _Just ask._ She shook her head. Not yet. She kept flipping.

Starting in 2024, the third year Stefan and Caroline had lived together, they were always back at the Salvatore house for New Year's. The décor had gotten more extravagant, and the guest list much longer.

"Caroline's mayoral years, I take it?" she asked after she saw a photograph of Caroline posing casually in her sleek pink cocktail dress with a group who clearly made up the Mystic Falls contingent of the Small Business Association. _Vampire in the lion's den_ , she'd labeled it, not at all circumspectly.

"Got it in one. We were experimenting with transparency, in those days. We put the founding families on a joint council with us. We were honest about the threats we were confronting. We protected them from some bad people who came through. Matt took down a serial killer around that time—human, but posing as a vampire. The guy had killed Laura, just a few weeks before Matt was gonna marry her." Stefan sighed, bending himself to squint at this picture where Laura and Matt were dancing on a table, lost for a moment in a memory that was clearly still as bitter as it was sweet. Elena felt her heart ache a little harder. "Mostly, those were good years for us, though. For the town, too. Mostly."

She nodded slowly. "And how long did you and Caroline live together?"

There was a short pause. "Six years."

She drew in a breath. He and Caroline had lived together for longer than Elena had known him.

But she couldn't make herself look up. It was too big a thought to think out loud. She just flipped another page.

Iris, the oracle, and Ollie, Jeremy's witch girlfriend and later his wife, had both showed up around the same time. Elena could tell they were important because, despite the shifting cast of friends and lovers that filtered in and out through the years, they were the only ones ever invited to join the ritual midnight photos with their heartbreaking empty space at the center.

"She looks so familiar," Elena breathed. "Iris, I mean." She could swear she'd seen this woman's smiling, open, freckled face looking at her with grave concern, her gray eyes with quiet understanding, hair shining red and gold and orange depending on the light. But when?

Stefan looked down at her seriously. "She should. She came to you in the dream, frequently. Her power—prophecy—has something to do with being able to enter the dream plane while she's awake. In dire circumstances, she could bring us to you. And she checked in on you regularly herself, just to reassure us. Do you remember?"

Elena shook her head. "I… almost. But I dreamed of you—of all of you—all the time. It's all so blurry—like a…." She trailed off. It hadn't been "like a dream"; it had been a dream, just longer than anyone else she knew had ever had.

She turned back to the album. Not much left now.

By 2027, Stefan and Caroline had been on the outs at New Year's, and it showed; he was absent from most of the photos. Not Damon, though; he seemed to have stepped neatly in as host, and Caroline had caught him once in a conspiratorial wink in Iris's direction. Elena was relieved that she found it more comforting than troubling. She had wanted so badly for him to be happy; she had known how hard he would fight against it.

The one picture of Stefan that year was of him out on the roof, scribbling in his journal in the moonlight. The caption read, _Give My Love to Elena._

Stefan smiled faintly, but his eyes didn't mean it. "That's what she shouted up to me. Caroline, when she saw me writing. The first words she'd spoken to me in months. I didn't know she had her camera."

"You should have been down at the party, Stefan."

He rolled his shoulders, at that. "I wasn't in a partying mood. And besides, I wrote to you every New Year's." He smiled again, ruefully. "Usually the 'day' and not 'eve'. You'll see."

When she met his eyes this time, she finally understood what was so different about him, what had shifted. The change was so minute it had been hard to see at first.

He wasn't afraid of his feelings anymore. Not ashamed of having hurt Caroline or having been hurt by her, of having loved her and still loving her. Not running, either, from Elena drawing her own conclusions about what it meant, that he'd spent that New Year's up on a roof writing to her, a dozen years after he'd last set eyes on her. He felt how he felt; he did what he did. He could let all of his feelings be true at once.

That wasn't ambivalence, not like the old days; it was just straightforward complexity.

 _What if I don't know any of them, anymore?_

"The war came around that time the next year," Stefan said gently, cutting into her revelation. "We drove the last prong of the invasion out of Mystic Falls on Christmas Day. I'm not sure… I'm not sure what you're going to see." From his tone, he was dreading it.

When she flipped the page, there was only one photo, here in the great room in front of this very fireplace. Unlike in previous years, everyone was sitting down, on the brick ledge by the fire or right on the floor. Leaning in toward the center. Jeremy had a long cut on his face, and what looked like a burn on his hand. Iris had a high scarf around her neck that, with the flash, was just a little too sheer to totally hide the bandage beneath. Stefan had his chin on his hands, physically holding his head up. Caroline's eyes just a bit empty, and she didn't seem to know the picture was happening. Bonnie had clearly just been crying.

Damon alone was wearing a grim smile.

The caption, she didn't understand. _We Are Not Missing You This Year._ And when she looked, she saw there was no missing space—everyone was leaning up against each other.

"Damon gave this big speech," Stefan said quietly. "You weren't gone. We had fought for you; our friends had died for you. You were with us at every minute. The thought of you, knowing that you were alive and you loved us, gave us the strength to carry on." He shrugged. "We are _not_ missing Elena this year. That must have been what he said, word for word, when Caroline gathered us up for the photo."

She absorbed that, felt it pass like a hard wind through her chest. And felt it lodge there. "I have a thousand questions," she said honestly. "And I have no idea where to start." She looked down at the photo album on her lap, then looked away from this photo she didn't want to see, this artifact of time that she hated having missed. "I hate knowing how many people made sacrifices in my name."

Stefan sighed. "I can understand that, but Elena—"

"I know. It wasn't about me, it was about the cure. I can't think about it." Elena set the album aside altogether, and the journal atop it. "I mean, I did my thinking already, months ago. I mean—months before the sleep spell. Years ago. And I don't know if I can share the cure, Stefan. I'm afraid it'll just… it'll just get passed on—you know, that someone else will be cured, and I'll be a vampire again." She sighed. "And then again…" She shook her head. She didn't want to think about her regrets about becoming mortal again, either.

Stefan nodded; maybe he'd even heard what she didn't say. He hadn't always. But she sensed that this Stefan heard more, and she knew, too, that there was a lot that he had tried to say about the people in these photos which she hadn't quite understood.

"Wait a minute. I promised you that bottle of '29 Dom," was all he said. That note he'd sealed with her in the crypt over a decade before. _Of course he remembered_. "It's on ice. I'll get it."

While he was gone, she flipped the album back open to that picture of him, alone up on the roof, the moonlight streaming down on him, the stars crystalline and random. Tragedy behind him and more ahead, and there he was, perched on a rooftop, pen in hand, writing to her about the day, about the year. About the roof and the moon….

He popped the cork as he walked back in, and then went to the bar to grab two champagne flutes.

"Just wait." Elena reached a hand to cover the wrest the bottle out of his hand. "I'm not ready."

"OK."

She swung the champagne bottle a little wildly as she talked, feeling frantic, feeling vaguely like she wanted to throw it into the fire. "I just… I feel… It's like you all had a big party and you didn't invite me. And… and you're all older than me now!" she said, absurdly, and she started to cry as she said it.

"I was about a hundred and fifty years older than you on the day we met," he said with the utmost gentleness.

She shook her head. "No you weren't. Just—in time. Not in your heart. But now…"

"Ah." He rocked back on his heels, cocked his head sideways at her. "When I turned a hundred and seventy, Damon congratulated me on finally reaching the 'emotional maturity of a 28-year-old,'" he offered. "I asked him when he thought he would get there."

Elena was crying harder now. She was still twenty—still twenty, in every possible way. She couldn't even drink legally in public. Or… God, maybe she could, because the DMV probably wouldn't recognize a _sleep_ curse as having frozen her age in time! So she was thirty-four years old, overnight—no, thirty-four and a _half_! She'd never even really imagined being that old. Caroline and Stefan had _lived together_ for six years. Jeremy had a daughter! And a _wife_! And Damon and Bonnie…

She wanted to laugh, when she remembered talking to Stefan, and later to Damon, about being together "forever."

"I had no idea," she whispered. "I haven't had two weeks since my sixteenth birthdays when there hasn't been some kind of… some kind of earthquake knocking me off my feet. It wasn't that long ago—for me, I mean. I want a promise. I want something certain. Goddamn it, I want _something_ to be the same!"

Stefan's brows shot up; he'd probably never heard her swear. "You have time. To find yourself again. It won't happen all at once."

"Time. To _catch up_ ," Elena spat out.

"To catch up with people who have loved you every day they were without you," Stefan returned, a hint of anger at the edge of his tone. "With people who felt every minute of your absence like a knife in their guts."

Elena buried her face in her hands. "You are still people who love me," she whispered. "But the people I loved are long gone. Changed. _Old._ "

Stefan didn't even give that thought a second of consideration. He shook his head, and his next move made her sure she was right; she didn't know this Stefan at all. He picked up a champagne flute and filled it, then the other. "You want to feel sorry for yourself. Fine. You're entitled. You lost time, and a lot of things go when you lose that. But don't you dare cheapen your love for me. For… for any of us. You don't have to _want_ something certain, something that stayed the same, Elena. I love you. Damon loves you. Bonnie loves you. Jeremy, Matt, Caroline, Alaric, even freaking Tyler Lockwood would lay down his life for you. Trust me." He shoved a glass in her hands. "I know. _You don't get any closer to eternity than that_."

Elena's eyes overflowed again, and she knew she was an idiot, was sick of herself, sick of how she couldn't seem to stop crying. She stood and wrapped herself up in Stefan again. "I love you," she whispered. "I didn't mean it. I mean, I did, but—not that part."

"I know that, Elena." He was holding her very gently. He knew she could break. "You know," he said after a while, "you're spilling four thousand dollar champagne on my back."

"You deserve it," she said into his chest. "You rushed me."

"That's probably true." He pulled himself away, and if he had to force himself, that was between him and his conscience alone. "Now let's drink to Bonnie Bennett, who has saved your life ten times over and who wouldn't want you to cry."

Elena bit back the retort that flew into her head, at that. Because she wasn't sure yet that he was wrong, and even if he was, he was right. She lifted what was left of the champagne in her glass. "To Bonnie," she whispered, letting the sharp clink of old crystal on old crystal, her glass on Stefan's, ring in her ears like a portent, a warning shot, a wedding bell.

He pulled her down beside him on the couch, dragging her up against his shoulder. "It'll be easier in the morning, I bet."

Her chin set. "I don't want to go to sleep again."

He leaned down to look into her eyes as seriously as he ever had. She wondered, as his gaze flickered once, then twice, what he saw there. "OK," he murmured. He patted his lap. "Lay down here then."

"What on earth…?"

"I'm gonna read to you." He grabbed his own journal from the side table. And she thought about that, thought about what it meant that _this_ , this was waking up. She let out a deep breath, let go of her control over what was left of the day; for now, she let go of her pain, her anger, her fear. She laid her head down on Stefan's thigh and felt his hand come to stroke her hair. "I take it you already read the first one?"

"Yeah."

"OK, then." He helped her settle her old quilt, which had seldom left the back of the couch since last she'd used it, over her legs and up to her shoulders. _You don't get closer to eternity than that._ "Here goes. June 9th, 2015. Elena. I guess the first thing to say is that Damon left this morning. The good news is that he told me where he was going. But he _didn't_ say when he was coming back. It's been three days since we spelled you into the crypt, and neither of us could stand it here in the house. 'It has too few memories,' I told him. He knew exactly what I meant…."

His free hand rested low on Elena's back except when he needed to turn a page. Like an anchor to hold her there. Stefan wondered if he was the only one who felt _this_ memory, this moment, fill up a house that had never really been empty, not in all these years, but had also never been full quite like this.


	5. Chapter 4 All Yours

_we spend most of our lives this way, governed  
_ _by the rules of avoidance, narrowly scraping past  
_ _unavoidable pains, folding up the quilts  
_ _we can't sleep under any more, listening  
_ _for the rattling of chains, waiting for the things we break  
_ _to come back to us—the underwater sounds  
_ _of those we have drowned, whose faces  
_ _it might have been better to never have loved.  
_ -T. Cole Rachel, "this poem is haunted"

* * *

 **Chapter 4. "All Yours"**

Stefan heard Damon coming, of course; he had known who it was well before Damon's car was in the garage. _Thank God you had your phone on, brother._ He didn't stand up. He left Elena where she was, the back of her head tucked into the angle made by his thigh and his abdomen. The soft susurrus of her breath, the steady tidal rush of her blood in and out of her heart, told him that she hadn't heard who was coming, but slept on, here against him.

In the great room's wide-open doorway, he saw a weary Damon emerge in a tight black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that had probably last been fashionable around the time Elena was born, though Stefan knew if Damon was wearing them, they'd probably come back around again. Walking in, his eyes already fixed on the human in Stefan's lap, Damon was cupping the back of his own neck, and something hard and rueful flickered across his face when he took in Stefan and Elena, there together.

Stefan shook his head. They were prepared for this, this time. And it meant something different, now. Still, he tested his brother reflexively. "Nothing ever changes, huh, brother?" He said it no louder than he breathed—Elena, two feet from his face, might not have heard him even if she'd been awake. But Damon had no trouble.

His brother passed this test with the ghost of a grin. "Funny. I was just thinking how much does." His gaze trained again on Elena, couldn't tear itself away. "Does she know yet?"

"She suspects. I thought you would want to be the one to explain." Stefan shrugged. "I'm glad you got here—any situations need cleaning up back at the airport?"

Just a hint of dark satisfaction at the corners of Damon's mouth told Stefan all he needed to know about his brother's method of motivating whatever airline pilot had the misfortune of meeting his urgent travel needs tonight. "I took care of it," Damon said briefly. Then, more heavily: "I saw Bonnie."

"That's…" Stefan trailed off. _Telling. That you went there first._ He eased Elena off his lap now, got up. He wanted her to have more time to sleep; years of a different sort of dreams aside, he knew these bombshells must be exhausting. He clapped his brother's back the same way he always did when Damon came back from a mission, win or lose. "Wanna talk about it?"

But Damon refused with a wave of a hand. "Alaric filled me in. About the Pegacite—about the terms. We have to talk, Stefan. All of us, much as it annoys me to make my business family business. But," and now a light was back in his eyes, just faintly, "her first."

Stefan's voice was even softer, now, like the tip of a needle strumming a cotton ball. "She's all yours, brother."

Damon's eyes danced darkly, at that. "Now, now. You and I know that _that_ 's never been true."

"Regardless…" Stefan had lived that reality, so he didn't dwell there. "She's fragile—really aware of how much she's lost. And… Damon." He shook his head to ward off a truth he'd come to fear in the last few years, even as he voiced it. "She's very _young_ , now."

Damon's eyes narrowed, like he'd sighted a rhino on a glacier—zeroing in on something Stefan was suddenly sure that Damon actually hadn't expected at all. His brother was so relentlessly clever, his deductive reasoning skills as much better than Stefan's as Stefan's inductive ones were better than Damon's. But there had been no evidence from which to deduce this. It would have involved his brother speculating about the dangers of relative experiences of time. That wasn't the kind of scheming at which he specialized.

Damon was fast, though. And after all, he knew as readily as Damon how much had happened to them since Elena had last been with them. "I hear you, brother."

Stefan let his eyes slip back once more to the girl tucked beneath an old quilt on their couch, the girl who'd saved each of them and had given them to each other even as she'd nearly torn them apart. And what could they give her, now? They had only kept her safe one way. The other was impossible.

"Everyone will be here at breakfast. Family meeting," was all Stefan said. "So go easy on yourself, too."

Stefan stole out of the room, telling himself the same. _Go easy on yourself, this time._

 _Don't listen to them._

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )-(]**

Damon wasn't sure how to wake Elena. The devil in him wanted to slip in where Stefan had been sitting, to nestle her head back on _his_ lap, to wait and watch for the confusion that would dawn when she realized she'd fallen asleep with one Salvatore and woken up with the other. To gauge the reaction that would follow on the heels of her confusion.

The dark impulse, the old surge of jealousy underneath it… for a moment, he welcomed them. It was like a wild trip in a time machine.

But God. At the end of the day—even a fourteen-year-long day—Damon didn't really want to go back there.

So instead he slid onto the floor beside her, laying his head back onto the cushion by her abdomen. Listening to her breathe. Once, he'd thought he'd spend decades taking in that sound—and then thought he'd be decades without it.

In the end, neither had been true. The truth, instead, was much more complicated. Would she be able to understand it?

"Elena," he said after a few moments. He hadn't intended to speak or planned what to say; but he was used to his actions knowing his heart before his head did. He had no problem trusting his instincts. "Wake up, baby."

Her eyes came open, and to see them flicker to take him in instantaneously, he thought, _hell, Stefan's right. Some things don't change._ When he heard her say his name, a voice saying a word in the way she was the first woman who ever had—with love, and trust built into the pitch and timbre—he didn't resist his instinct. He pressed his lips to the lips that those two syllables had tumbled through. Just softly. Just so there were a few words, the obvious ones, that he didn't need to _say_.

When he lifted his head, she looked bemused, but not angry, and he, well, he found what he often found in Elena's kiss—a close, clear encounter with what he was actually feeling, a quick window into what he usually held at bay. _God, how I missed you. Sweetheart, I'm afraid you won't forgive me—afraid that I don't really need you to. No. I'm afraid this will hurt you so much you'll break._ And then, hard on the heels of it all, guilt, regret, at a gesture he'd had no right at all to make.

Instinct was bone-deep, and Damon's habit was to deflect. "So. How'd you sleep?" he asked drily. "I bet you're getting pretty good at it by now."

 _Of course the first thing he says to me calls for a drumroll and a rimshot_ , Elena thought. "I think this is where you say, 'We need to talk,'" she said flatly. But then her face got soft and still. "And then… you say the rest."

Now the mischief skittered out of Damon's eyes, to see what she already knew in hers. "I _can't_."

Elena swallowed hard, trying to swallow the sleep-hoarseness clinging to her voice, a whole decade of it at once. "You just say it, Damon."

"I rehearsed it a hundred times. And to be honest with you, I still have no idea how to explain it to you. How it's even possible. I can barely believe you're even _here…_ "

"I am here, though. I am. So you have to."

"And to think that Stefan believes you're _young_ now. You were always so much older and wiser. The rest of us need a minute to catch up."

Elena looked away. "You've had enough minutes, I think. More than enough."

"Let's just be here—just be here in this moment. For just a little while, Elena… I waited for so long."

Elena's eyes darkened at him. Like she saw she was being tempted by the devil, and the devil had disappointed her for doing it. An old look, that took him straight back to a self he thought he'd shed like a skin. She tempted him to play the devil so easily. "No," she said. "You stopped waiting. At some point. Which is why you have to say… you have to say, 'Bonnie and I fell in love. I never expected it.'"

Damon felt his fists clench. She was smiling now, and God, but he'd missed that smile, knowing and compassionate, able to keep loving even through her own pain. No wonder she had been the one to show him how to forgive Stefan, to forgive himself for pretending to be Abel to Stefan's Cain for a long century. _Elena, God, how did I forget the power you have over me?_

"Baby. Don't." He leaned away and put a hand out over her mouth. What if she couldn't forgive this time? What would he do then? Who would he be?

She held his hand away as if it were inconsequential. "Then you say, 'But it happened. She—she—she… _snuck up on me_. We made each other happy. That was what you said you wanted, Elena.' And then, well, then you tell me a little of the particulars—when it all started, how many years I'd been gone. Whether everyone knows." Damon's acute hearing was a problem, now; he was having a hard time hearing her over the rush of blood in his own brain. This impossible woman. "And finally," Elena finished softly, and pulled his hand onto her cheek as if modelling for him how to be honest with her, how to take care, "you tell me how it's possible that Bonnie Bennett was expecting your baby."

Damon's hand fell off her cheek the moment she let it go, like it burned. "Stefan said you suspected." His head fell back on the couch again. "Even he doesn't know about that last part."

Elena's heart shuddered in her chest to hear the confirmation, and she saw the answering shudder, the shudder that said he'd heard it, shake through Damon's shoulders. She remembered the way that Stefan had looked tonight, a goblet of blood in one hand, a forkful of pad thai in the other, as he'd explained to her and Klaus about the terms of the Pegacite curse. Guarded. A touch… bitter, perhaps. But when he'd looked at her, he'd been a little pitying. "I wouldn't be so sure about that."

Damon scowled. "I wanted to tell him myself. Maybe Iris…" he shook his head. "That woman has been cruising for a one-way ticket back to Delphi for a long time."

"I don't think you mean that." Elena leaned back against the couch, pulled one of its throw pillows up protectively around her stomach. She gave herself a moment to stretch, slowly , through her legs, to feel them come to life. Maybe because she felt the sudden urge to run. "Just… _you_ tell _me_."

Damon seemed to focus on the firelight dying in front of him for a long time before he came to his decision. "Fine. We'll rip it off like a bandage. If there's still an open wound, at least I…" He seemed, for once, to think better of the vampire snark that was about to follow. "Bonnie and I were in Greece together, what, oh, seven years ago or so. Looking for an oracle. Delphi was a bust, actually. Did you—do you know about Iris?"

"Just that she's here, sees the future, walks the dream plane, lives with Alaric. I… are she and Stefan…?"

"Your goddamned intuition, Elena. No wonder we never needed a prophetess when you were here." Damon didn't otherwise answer the question she hadn't quite asked, but that was answer enough, and it burrowed into the space between them. "Bonnie and I… we'd been skating on thin ice for… a while. Traveling together. She'd come to… Elena, she'd come to _like_ me."

"Imagine that," Elena smiled ironically. _Is that my heart breaking?_ It was curious that it felt like this, like a fact only relevant to a vampire—alternately like she was getting too much blood there, and then too little, back and forth. "Because you let her in. You let her see the real you."

"I… yeah. I didn't mean to," he defended himself, and Elena choked back a wearied laugh. Her poor Salvatore brothers, who sabotaged themselves so many different ways. _I didn't mean to let a good woman see me._ _I swear._ "She just… she was relentless. You… you took me as I was, Elena. The bad and the good. That let me stop… you know."

"Stop having to prove how bad you were."

"Yeah. Mostly. Unless I let myself be bad on your behalf." Damon, against all odds, could do chagrin with the best of them. "But Bonnie… she knew I could be better. And she knew I'd quit trying, after you left. She was the one who'd always had to clean up my messes, she said. I found myself trying to _prove_ myself to her, which, God, it was all so Victorian, so _Stefan_ , but I…"

"You wanted to be the man she knew you could be."

"God help me. I did." He paused a long moment before saying the rest unprompted. "I _do_."

"Well." Damon didn't know what he expected Elena to say, but it wasn't what she did. "Thank God."

Damon shook his head at that, rapidly, shaking off the shadow of forgiveness it implied, like a dog shook off water after an unwanted bath. "It was all so impossible," he scowled. "I felt—I knew—I was cheating on you. Not that she was the first in my bed, Elena, after you left." He'd decided on the full confession. "But she was the first…"

"In your heart. Of course she was."

"And she—she hated feeling like she was betraying you. Hated me for not keeping better faith with you, her best friend." He blew out a breath. "Maybe… maybe hated you a little, too, for still having such a hold on me."

"I told you to live your life," she said. "I wanted you to… to…"

"To find just enough happiness that I wasn't miserable, but not so much that I wasn't waiting for you, longing for you to come back."

She bit her lip. "Was I that obvious?"

"You're a generous woman, Elena—too generous—but at the end of the day," he heaved a long breath at this old problem, "you're only human."

"I mean…" Elena was trying to hold in all that she was feeling. She mostly felt mugged, shaken down. Strip-mined. And she found she had some pride, after all. They didn't want to have hurt her; she didn't want him to know how much they had. _We were in love yesterday. Weren't we? You told me I was your life._ "It wasn't exactly a normal breakup. I didn't have a chance to… to get over you. I would have tried if I'd…"

"If you'd been awake—been with me— _it never would have happened_." Then Damon squeezed his eyes shut. "Or maybe that's the grand daddy of all the lies I told myself. Told Bonnie." He rolled his shoulders against the gilded chevron damask of the couch, thinking about time he and Bonnie had lost because Elena had lost so much more. "At first we said it was just sex." The pulley attached to Elena's heart jerked it up and down wildly, at that. "Then, when we admitted it wasn't… that was the worst of all. We didn't tell anyone for… a long time. Didn't think that they'd understand. Especially not Caroline and Stefan. They needed to believe that Bonnie and I were gonna find a way to get you back. They would never have believed we were still trying if they knew that we… well, that's what we thought. But Caroline, I guess she figured it out. That first Valentine's Day, after Iris came, she called an intervention at the bar."

Elena bit out a travesty of a laugh. _Oh, Caroline._ She'd given them fully half the honesty their little circle had ever known. "Did she put on Cupid wings?"

"Nah. She just stuck with the 'arrow to the heart' bit. Although that was mostly a threat. Said I was playing with fire—might destroy both of her best friends at once. And that I was lucky that one or the other of you had always seemed to think my life was worthwhile. Or she'd kill me herself." He rolled his eyes. "I knew it was bluster—and I knew I could take her with my eyes closed—but Stefan…" He shook his head. "He was pretty righteously pissed."

"At Caroline?"

"Ha. Guess again."

"Oh."

" _His_ threats made it look like Caroline had given her blessing. He got physical. Then got all silent and broody." Damon blinked. "I called him on it, of course. Told him _you_ had said you didn't need me to be faithful, so maybe he should think about why _he_ needed me to…" Damon sighed. "This isn't fair, though. I'm trying to catch you up on impossible stuff we figured out over a hell of a lot of years. And I think…"

"You're doing it to distract me from the point."

"Yeah. Which is…" He still couldn't bring himself to say it, felt like he was choking somewhere just below where words got formed.

"Which is," Elena managed it again, "that we actually broke up seven years ago." She let the tears fall again, now, could never have stopped these ones. "And you couldn't tell me… because I was asleep."

The words landed almost soundlessly, like hearing a beloved old tree fall from thirty miles away.

They stood a moment there, as though taking in that tree's entirety, from roots uprooted to grounded branches that had one reached for the sky, Elena's tears the only things moving between them. Damon fought his own. He'd already shed more than his share, over this damned gorgeous old tree, strained everything inside him trying to root it again, bring it back to life without her.

"That's… yeah. That's it." Damon grabbed her hand now, wanting to at least hold onto her as she came to see this fact he'd fought against for so long, this fact that had been so impossible to bear alone, and to mourn alone. "I came to you in the dream, that Valentine's Day. Made Iris drag me there, because she owed me after what she did to us at the conclave… You hear about the war yet?"

"Yeah," Elena murmured. She felt cold now. She felt like she had been in one. "I heard about the conclave, that Iris spilled the news about the cure. About me. The invasion. The attacks." She wiped away the tears that were still falling impatiently. Strained to remember anything like a dream of Valentine's Day. There was something there. She could almost…

Damon nodded. "Idiot oracle who brought the future crashing down on all our heads. Anyway. She owed me. So she took me in there, and I found you, in your dream, up on the south roof, dreaming of the spring starting to come in." He paused. "Elena. Your heart just now… just stopped for a moment there."

Elena slid her hand onto his shoulder, squeezed very gently. _God, that roof,_ she thought. "I just almost remembered part of the dream, is all," she whispered another truth.

And that answered a question Damon had been holding onto. "Yeah. I didn't think you knew for sure I was real. You never did." He shook his head. "I had come before—to find out where your mom's safety deposit box was, to ask you if Katherine had been there… long stories, both of those, problems from other days. Stefan came, too, more than once. We said we needed your help, for you to tell us things only you knew, but… I think we each wanted the excuse. Needed it."

Elena slid down on the floor now, wrapped Damon up in the blanket alongside her. When would he stop breaking her heart? How had both of these brothers gotten so weary, so accepting of their needs, their loves, their pain? And how long would it be before she had that much wisdom, that much forebearance? For herself, she just wanted to scream. So badly.

But Elena had never found anger in the face of someone else's pain in her own life. And now, in the face of her own…

 _They didn't manage to grow up for a hundred and fifty years. Then they met you. And when you left, they kept growing up without you._

 _Scream about it when you're alone._

Elena was used to doing her suffering in solitude. So she leaned her head on his shoulder. "I'm glad you came to the dream," she said. "Even to tell me it was over. It was a little lonely, I think."

He took a deep breath. "Well, I'm glad you're here now."

"Now _that's_ the grand daddy of all the lies, Damon," she said said gently. "It's not my time yet. And I know it. I do. We'll get Bonnie back, Damon." She reached her arms, hidden under the quilt, around his middle, held him hard. Made herself listen to his heart, beating steadily beneath her ear. Breathed him in, all those invigorating, sinful smells—coffee, sweat, bourbon. A small comfort. "I promise you. We'll get her back."

And then she broke apart inside, because there in her arms, Damon Salvatore started to cry, and once he started, he didn't try to stop. "I love you so much," he gritted.

And Elena found that now, after all, she couldn't cry with him, could only hold on tight and try not to feel like she was being used.

Yes. He loved her. Of course he did.

But that, too, was only the smallest part of the truth, the oldest, but somehow far from the most important.

The rest of it, she could still hardly fathom.


	6. Chapter 5 Hold the Cigars

_For it is important that awake people be awake,_

 _or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;_

 _the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—_

 _should be clear: the darkness around us is deep._

-William Stafford, from "A Ritual to Read to Each Other"

 **Chapter 5, "Hold the Cigars"**

An impossible few hours later, the smell of Stefan's French toast wafting up from their plates, Elena was totally overwhelmed by all the men in her life, who'd converged at the Salvatore boarding house to welcome her home. The words "I can't believe you're here" came to sound, to her ears, like "I wish Bonnie was here instead."

She didn't think it was only her own conscience, oddly both guilty and righteous.

Alaric, Matt, Tyler, and Jeremy—her little brother, whom she feared would always be older now, and maybe that was the thing that had broken her heart most of all since she woke up—had taken turns lifting her up and spinning her around, staring at her and shaking their heads, telling her over and over again how much they'd missed her. Damon and Stefan had stood watch over it all, shoulder to shoulder. They were shepherds. It looked like they were used to it.

"I can't wait until Caroline gets back tonight," Elena smiled when Matt, Tyler and Alaric all tried to pull out her dining room chair at the same time. "Way too much testosterone around here."

A lot of faces went blank, at that; Damon's shut down like a power outage, and that was when Elena heard what she'd said, when she thought about who was missing. Jeremy was blunt with it. "Ollie's on her way," he offered. "She stopped in to see her. To see Bonnie, to see what she could learn about the Pegacite. She's gonna talk to her witch friends."

Elena recovered herself. "And when do I get to meet my niece and almost-namesake?"

Damn. She hadn't intended that to come out in a whisper.

Jeremy's face went hard. "She's never coming to Mystic Falls." Her little brother put his hand over hers, let it eloquently evoke their family's story. "Not while there's this war on, while the cure's still…" he shrugged helplessly.

"Walled up in _your_ body," Matt finished frankly. Unlike Jeremy and Tyler, there was no hint of grey yet at his temples. But the grooves on his forehead and around his eyes told their own story of the years since she'd last seen him. "Not that we're telling you what to do about it."

"Yes. Your body, your choice, I've always said," Damon added ironically. Elena didn't know what to do with all the disgusted scowls that came his way; they made it clear he'd have been perfectly willing to bargain away the cure years ago if the rest of them had let him.

Stefan cleared his throat. "Speaking of bodies and choices…" He raised his brow in Damon's direction.

"Very smooth, brother."

Stefan was undaunted. "You need to tell us what you know about Bonnie."

"And he sticks the landing!" Damon intoned.

Elena took a long swallow of her coffee to bolster her nerves. "He's right. You need to tell them, Damon."

Damon's grin was taunting her, now, and _that_ was familiar and irritating, to be on the wrong end of his dark mood. "Oh, but you think you figured it all out, Elena. So why don't you tell them?"

"I don't know enough, and you said you wanted to tell Stefan yourself," she reminded him sharply. "And avoidance of it is beneath you."

Ric, sipping a coffee that was more Irish than Javanese, let out a low whistle. "So it's true." Tyler and Matt exchanged a swift glance that told Elena that they'd suspected it, too.

 _Oh, Damon. It helps to know you're not fooling anyone anymore. If you ever were._

"What's true?" Jeremy, holed up in Canada as he'd been, was out of this loop. "What did you do, Damon?"

Damon took in a long, deep breath, and then recovered himself. "I suppose cigars are premature," he said. He wasn't looking at anyone but Stefan, and there was an entreaty in his eyes as he did. "But I'm going to be a father. Somehow. Eventually. If we break the Pegacite curse. Oh, and if the Gilbert serum really didn't fail."

Stefan's face paled—not the veined, haunting white of his inner vampire going in for a kill. The skipped heartbeat of a man taking in a shock to the system. "You managed to do it," he breathed.

Tyler's shoulders had set. "Does Caroline know?" He shoved his chair out from the table. "God. She's gonna lose her mind."

Stefan was looking down, now. "She'll deal with it."

"She won't. Not when she spent so long—"

"She'll _deal with it_ ," the younger Salvatore brother repeated. He was a touch bitter. "She always does."

Tyler just clenched a fist and pounded the bottom it back against the wall behind him. But it was Matt who had the stomach, ultimately, for details.

"How'd you manage it?" he asked Damon softly. "To use the serum?"

Jeremy was shaking his head bewilderedly. "Caroline? Serum? What haven't you guys been telling me?"

Elena's eyes were clouded, too. "You and me both," she murmured, knowing it was unfair and not caring.

"Stefan," Damon said mockingly, "did you manage to get our Powerpoint on Salvatore vampire fertility history queued up? No? Well, then it'll have to be without the charts and graphs and snazzy transitions. Although I do think a slow-fade-out-fade-in—"

"Caroline wanted to have children," Stefan cut him off. He was looking at the Gilberts only. "After Lennie was born… We didn't want to tell you, Jeremy. We didn't want you to feel… _guilty_ … about something so wonderful."

"The only kid likely to be born to anyone in the whole clan," Damon's voice hardened on this hard truth, not wanting to let anyone look away from it. "Since all the rest of us were inconveniently coupled up with members of an incompatible species. But miscegenation is such an ugly word, isn't it? Especially when it's biologically impossible."

"So Caroline was seeking a cure," Stefan broke in. "It was… a hard time for us. If she was going to have a baby, it couldn't be mine— _and_ she couldn't keep being a vampire. We couldn't have the centuries together we'd been talking about." He was still looking down. "For a while, a baby… it was all she wanted."

Elena shook her head, words from last night's photo album adventure echoing in her head. _Caroline and I had broken up a few weeks before…Those were the first words she'd said to me in months._

"But you couldn't agree," Elena guessed. "You wanted to be with her forever."

Damon rolled his eyes. "As usual, the truth is a little more complicated than dreamy romantic eternities."

That was like a knife between her ribs, and Jeremy heard it and shot him a warning glare. The oldest man at the table held up his hands in surrender. "Ok, ok. But no, Elena. There _was_ a way. Sort of." Damon turned fully to the Gilberts, looking for all the world like a doctor who'd come to tell them that a loved one hadn't made it out of surgery. Compassionate, vaguely, but also firm, distant, professional. "Your father… His vampire experiments. He'd been working on this serum. A cure for vampirism—he thought of it as a weapon against vampires. A drug, born of extracting the blood of a vampire in transition, and mixing it with the blood of people with the werewolf gene who hadn't yet turned. And… more rigmarole. After he failed with all the other attempts—fairies, trolls, goblins…"

"Trolls… fairies?" Elena asked faintly.

"Long story," Tyler cut in.

"I'm starting to hate those words," she said through clenched teeth.

Matt smiled at her sympathetically. "Yeah. I bet."

Stefan was the one to continue. "The werewolf-blend serum worked. Not to actually cure vampirism, but to suspend it temporarily, for the length of a single moon cycle. All the things that made us vampires would… pause. Our speed, our heightened senses and emotions…"

"Our bloodlust," Damon added pointedly.

Stefan shot him a leveling glance. "Ultimately, that was why I couldn't keep taking it; the time I tried, when the hunger came back, it was so strong…"

"He killed some tourists," Tyler said candidly. "Not very nice ones, it turned out, but facts are facts."

"In the matchup between Stefan versus long breaks from human blood," Damon added under his breath, "Score, Stefan, zero, reality, one gajillion."

"Once was all it took, though. With me and Caroline both on the serum." Stefan was barely audible now, at least to Elena. Damon took pity on him and told the hard part.

"She got pregnant. Had to stay on the serum, monthly doses, for nine months or she'd revert to her vampire self and lose the baby. We can't make kids or carry them, normally. Nothing living comes from us. Nothing living can feed off of us." Damon blew out a breath, and then looked at his brother and his face softened. "Caroline was weak, on that serum. She was… effectively, she was human. We tried to protect her, but we had too many weak spots, that summer. She got kidnapped by a group of these goddamned Alchemists while Stefan and I were stuck down in Rio."

"And she… what, ran out of serum?" Jeremy guessed, his tone quiet, knowing what it must mean that he'd never seen Caroline pregnant. "She reverted to being vampire."

"She could have," Stefan shook his head. "Could have taken the serum, I mean. She… had it with her. But the Alchemists had kidnapped her to draw out Bonnie, and she knew it. As a human, she was too weak to fight them. She let them think she was weak. She… she let herself miscarry. Got her powers back. And then she…"

"She destroyed them to save Bonnie's life," Tyler finished flatly. "At tremendous personal cost." Stefan jaw hardened, at that. "And now all their surviving friends won't leave us the hell alone."

Elena was staring at her plate, now, the crumbs and syrup seeming to shout at her their homeliness, their mundanity. "I'm so sorry, Stefan."

"It wasn't meant to be," he muttered, as if reading from a script. "I don't know how we would have raised a human baby, anyway, the two of us, even if the war hadn't come." He looked uneasily at Jeremy. Then his gaze shot, fast and hard, at Damon. "And just how were _you_ planning on doing it?" he demanded. "And when exactly were you going to tell us?"

Jeremy squinted at Damon, too. "I can't believe _you_ ever took that serum. Like a cobra volunteering to spit out its fangs."

Damon looked everywhere but at Elena. "I took it a few times," he told the room. "Ultra-small doses—a few hours here, a few hours there. We didn't know if it would work, but I knew if I had a whole month off… Stefan and Caroline aren't the only ones who would have lost control." He rolled his shoulders around, then determinedly forked the last bite of sausage on his plate. "Jasper helped me. To realize I wanted to… try."

Elena gave up her close scrutiny of her own syrup pool. "Who's Jasper?"

"Our… therapist, I guess," Stefan told her, at the same time Damon said, "Old man who manages the bar."

"He's more like a life coach," Tyler corrected.

"More like _grandfather_ ," Matt said firmly.

Jeremy rolled his eyes. _Therapist,_ he mouthed at Elena. "My great-uncle," Ric said. "Sorry, but… long story, Elena."

She glared at him for that. But then she found the feeling beneath the helplessness those words caused. "Bonnie said…" She bit her lip. The feeling was betrayal. Damn, damn, damn. "She said she thought she'd found a way both of us could have our immortality. That's… this is what she wanted? To live on through her children?"

Damon nodded. "She wanted it badly, Elena. For lots of reasons. For herself, because, as she kept telling me, she wasn't getting any younger." He swallowed hard at that, then did it again. "For her magic, because she knew there were spells she could cast with her children and grandchildren that she couldn't cast alone, and she thought it would make us, make the town, safer, to have more Bennetts among us." He looked at Stefan, that same entreaty back in his eyes. "For you and Caroline. You both wanted children, and we knew we'd raise them, with our family, here on the Estate…"

Stefan's eyes squeezed shut again as Damon went on. "And for you. For you, Elena. She thought—hoped—it would be decades. She thought it would be easier for you if you could _see_ that she'd been happy, if you could have those pieces of her—our children or grandchildren could be your friends, could… could give you someone your own age…"

And now Elena shoved her plate out of the way so her head could hit the table. "Oh, just _stop_."

"I volunteered," Matt admitted huskily. "To… donate. To father her children. No serum required. It seemed like it would have been easier."

Damon's eyes went hot, and for a second the veins around his eyes sprang into focus. "Not for me," he ground out, the sharp, hot light of jealousy staying on his face even once his fangs receded. "Because she wanted it for me, too."

Now he was fighting with himself, and they were all of them looking away from that struggle, knowing he had no use for their pity. "So I would always know she'd… loved me. So I wouldn't have to be without her when she died—not… not entirely."

Jeremy shoved away from the table, now. "My God," he said. "I just… God. Vampires with human _..._ What a nightmare." He looked at Elena, who hadn't lifted her head, and Stefan, who had only just managed to open his eyes again. "As a father…" He didn't finish the sentence, but the disgust in his voice did it for him.

Jeremy stalked out of the room and they heard the garden door slam behind him a moment later. Alaric set down his mug with a deliberate thud, then heaved himself to his feet. "I'll go after him," he said quietly.

 _How much more is there to know,_ Elena wondered inanely into the table. _How many basic facts are hanging over my head, puzzle pieces to a picture I don't fit into any more, that everyone else can already see?_ _How could Damon do this to me? And how long before they realize I don't belong?_ She wanted to run after Ric and Jeremy. A child's retreat, that, and that was the problem in a nutshell. So she held herself very still, belying the rage and total bewilderment swirling chaotically inside.

"So… Bonnie's already pregnant, then," Tyler said finally.

"And she's dead. Sort of," Matt concluded.

"She's in _stasis_ ," Damon gritted. "She's alive."

Stefan's hands were gripping the edge of the mahogany table hard; it was creaking beneath his fingers. "I wish you'd talked about this with me, brother," he said softly.

"Yeah. Me, too," Damon said. He watched his brother warily. "But you know me, brother. I'm reckless—secretive—cunning—"

"Those are old excuses."

"And scared." Damon shook his head. "I was scared you'd be upset. No. That you'd talk me out of it."

Tyler and Matt shot each other glances, and Elena sat up, now.

"You wanted this, too," she whispered. "You wanted—to be a _father_ … I never even _thought_ about that, when we were together…"

Damon sighed. "You were eighteen years old when we got together, Elena. I wish you'd had more time to spend thinking about cutting class to fool around, time to lose experimenting with drugs rather than to insane sleep curses… Children were, to say the least, not a priority. For either of us."

She shook her head. "I just… your lives keep revealing everything we… everything we were _hiding_ from. Ticking time bombs. Time was always going to… I was always going to… God. I feel like… like I'm looking at my email password written out on a jumbotron for everyone to see."

Tyler cringed a little at that. "Email doesn't actually have passwords any more, Elena, it's…"

"Not the point." Stefan pointed out the obvious; Elena didn't need to feel any _more_ lost in time.

"And you… I always knew _,_ actually, that you wanted children, Stefan. It was part of how loving you broke my heart. You wanted so badly to take care of others, and you never would have..." She shook her head, cutting herself off before she offended him more than he already had. "But I never thought about it. About what it meant. About how it might destroy us. I was… such an idiot."

"You were young," Matt offered kindly, his ears a little red at the tips, embarassed as he was to be hearing all of this spelled out.

"You still are, Elena." Stefan broke her heart a little, again. "You're young. Like you time traveled from the past to meet us here. And it's OK. You don't have to have out-guessed our whole lives. No one could have. And we wouldn't have gotten a chance to change, to figure ourselves out, if you'd had all the answers for us. Anyway… you still have to find them for yourself." He looked back to Damon, pressed his lips together. Shadows chased across his face. "But _you_ —Damon, you should have trusted me."

"I'm sorry, brother." Damon's eyes flickered around uneasily. "I did. I _do_. I just… I didn't trust myself."

Stefan nodded slowly, testing that thought and deciding he believed it. "Well. It's done now." He looked at Tyler. "Get Jeremy back, would you? Tell Ric we're breaking out mimosas, that ought to do the trick." He walked the long length of their dining room table to his brother, his eyes clearing, their clarity almost hiding how much those steps cost him. "We need to toast my brother, who's going to be a father." He looked to Matt and Elena, trying to will them to pick up on the torch of purpose in his eyes. "And then. We need to figure out how to make that happen."

And Damon stood to let his brother wrap his arms around him, the hard embrace telling him what it always did, which is that they would weather this storm together.

" _Brother,"_ was all he managed.

"Every time, brother. You know it. Back to back, on the edge of the darkness, taking on all comers. Together. Every single time. Count on it." Stefan smiled, and Damon saw swiftly both that his brother was in pain, and also that he meant what he was saying. "Because I do."

When they looked up to see Matt wrap his arms in comfort around Elena, who still looked more than a little lost, they met each other's eyes again. _Even through that—through her. Back to back, brother._

He cleared his throat. "Well, then, let's break out the bubbly. Lots to celebrate." But Damon's steps toward the cellar slowed when a hard thought occurred to him. He turned back to his brother, his old girlfriend, his friends. "While we're celebrating—we should take a picture—for Bonnie," he said.

Elena's eyes welled up, at that. But she was the first to nod. " 'Missing You At Breakfast'," she suggested hesitantly.

Even Stefan laughed a little, at that.

 _So,_ Elena enumerated to herself. _My boyfriend fell in love with my best friend and she got pregnant thanks to a serum my father made and would have used to kill him. My ex-boyfriend and my next best friend miscarried and broke up over the cure I would gladly have given them if I'd been awake. Oh, and a bunch of_ their _friends died in a war to save that cure, and me, from hordes of attacking vampires. Also I don't know how email works anymore. Or even who the president is._

 _All the things that were supposed to happen to me will never, ever happen._

The glass of champagne Elena lifted to Bonnie and Damon's baby was very different to the one she'd spilled on Stefan's shirt the night before, she couldn't help thinking. It tasted sweeter, almost cloying, but somehow it burned, going down. And seeing Jeremy's disgust, Tyler's discomfort, Damon's slight bitterness, Stefan's resolve, as Ric clicked a photo of their glasses clinking together, Elena was suddenly quite sure.

 _I shouldn't be here. God. Why couldn't I have stayed underwater?_

 _Asleep. I mean—stayed asleep._

The thought was an old friend.

That was probably why there was so much in Elena that welcomed it back.


	7. Chapter 6 What We Don't See Coming

… _So after love has led us, till he tires  
_ _Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,  
_ _Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,  
_ _He beckons us to follow, and across  
_ _Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.  
_ _Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?  
_ _Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?  
_ _We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;  
_ _And yet, and yet these days are incomplete._

-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from "Friendship After Love"

* * *

 **Chapter 6. "What We Don't See Coming"**

"You know what I've never understood?" Damon slid onto the bar stool next to Iris's. He tipped his chin up at Jasper, tending the bar, for his usual. "How come it takes a _third_ eye to have _second_ sight? I mean, it already takes a _second_ eye to see in three dimensions, right? So doesn't the second eye give you third sight, too? Surely a third eye really gives ladies like you _fourth_ sight? And then again what even is first sight—except a stupid way to fall in love?" He ignored her eyes rolling over the rim of her glass at him. "Don't you ever worry about how your vision is misnumbered, Delphina?"

"I'm starting to see a drink in every one of your eyes, in _your_ future," Iris said drily, taking a small warning sip of her sweet vermouth. Damon's banter was usually a welcome distraction. But a Salvatore was a problem on any night when she wanted to think about something other than the future; it hung so heavy around them. _Not tonight. I'm not reading anything tonight. They can find another oracle if that's what they're after._

"Truce," Damon said as Jasper thunked a whiskey neat his way. "I need your help."

"Where have I heard that before?" she murmured.

"This isn't about your visions. Not really. Scout's honor."

 _Oh._ _Just regular help._ That was gratifying. Still, in years of running away from people who would use her for her gift, she'd developed more than a little cunning. "Then use my name. You know very well I've never even _been_ to Delphi, and there are more oracles than—"

"Just hear me out. Iris." Damon, suddenly now, looked downright grave. Damn, but she was jealous of how effective his lightning-fast switches in mood could be, how he could control a whole room with them when he wanted to; did other people see it in the air, like she did? _No, and neither do you, tonight._ _Block it out._

But Damon was still talking. "I need to know about… this baby. About my baby. I need to know what you've seen."

Ah. Of course it actually _was_ about a vision, just not a demand for a new one. Still, she was sympathetic to this particular cause. "I told Ric everything, and I bet he told you that already, darlin'," Iris said quietly. She'd heard him stumble over what to call his child, and her heart went out to this man whom she'd watched overcome impossible odds to find anything like happiness in the last half decade.

"Yeah. But humor me. Let's review. You said, 'A vampire, then a witch. But there's something strange about that.' 'Born too soon.' 'Bonnie is stuck somewhere with just one flicker of light, and it needs to become two, and then become more than she can count.'"

"That's it. That's all I saw." Iris had never known what was worse—the people who didn't know about her gift and so didn't believe her warnings—or people like Damon, who believed but always wanted more than there was, wanted a time, a place, the appropriate response. Even for her, the future never came with those kinds of guarantees. "The rest of what I know, I know from Ollie, who has been consulting with her coven about Bonnie all day. But I bet you've already talked to her, too."

"Yeah. Short synopsis: the baby is part of Bonnie's—animus—part of the animation that's been suspended. So effectively, it's somehow in that damn Pegacite. The baby will be hard to separate out without breaking the whole rock. If it breaks, Bonnie…" Damon stared down into his drink. "Bonnie dies for real." Now he tossed it back and seemed to relish it burning down his throat. "But that's not gonna happen, so it's not worth talking about."

"No," Iris agreed easily. "It's not. What do you want from me, Damon?"

She knew him well enough now that she could actually see him put on his wheeling-and-dealing face. "You're having ladies' night tonight. When Caroline gets in from the airport. With Elena and Ollie."

"Yep. Planning on stealing a bottle of Triple Sec for the margaritas from Jasper here."

"If you didn't see it in a vision, I can guarantee _that's_ not gonna happen," the old man growled across the long slab of slate that made up his bar. "This is a business, not the Salvatore's personal kitchen. Or, given the way you all drink, their living room, bedrooms, porch, bathtub…"

"Hey, c'mon, J." Damon tossed back the whiskey all at once, a challenge in his eyes, daring Jasper to call him on it. "Who signs your paycheck?"

Jasper white eyebrows furrowed at Damon quellingly. "Stefan. When he remembers."

Damon winced. "Easy, there," he smiled placatingly. "I'll make sure she behaves herself." And he winked at Iris and stage-whispered to her, "I'll steal all the booze in the damn bar if you help me tonight."

"I may be eighty-eight years old, and I may have only been a vampire for a matter of months, boy, but there wasn't and isn't anything wrong with my hearing."

"Spoilsport." Quick as a whip, Damon shoved his empty tumbler back Jasper's way, smiled to see Jasper's vampire-swift fingers blur to grab it. "Make it a double this time, pops." He turned back to Iris. "It's ladies' night," he repeated. "This is just simple math, Iris. The baby needs to be born to get Bonnie back. I need Bonnie back. So I need someone I trust to carry this baby to term. It will have to be one of the four of you." He scowled. "Trust me. I looked into surrogacy already. Stefan has made it pretty clear that he won't be allowing me to compel a random mortal to gestate in place of my witch baby-mama in order to lift a curse. He has the _oddest_ sense of propriety, sometimes."

Iris didn't crack a smile. "You didn't always give him veto power over this kind of thing," Iris observed, watching him carefully. She was ignoring his bigger point; it was easy to sit with, since she'd already reached the same conclusion herself, almost as soon as the facts became known. If the baby had to be born to bring Bonnie back, and Bonnie was out of commission…

Damon shrugged. "He hadn't always earned it. Anyway, what is 'this sort of thing'? I've never been slated to be a father before. Not that we can't both throw a ball with the best of 'em, but is there any doubt that Stefan's gonna have better instincts about caring for something small and vulnerable?" He waited a beat. "Did I ever tell you he basically played with dolls when we were kids? Our father couldn't figure out why his soldiers never went to war. Stefan always wanted to be somebody's mother. Mainly mine, as it turned out."

Iris knew he was trying to bait her into saying more about Stefan, about how she felt about Stefan, than she ever intended to say to him. She was grateful when Jasper leaned in and spoke for her. Gruff, brooking none of Damon's nonsense. "Neither you nor your brother is short on protective instincts, or nurturing ones. You just do it differently. And remember, Damon. You're more like each other than not. You've learned from each other."

Damon nodded on a fortifying breath, and in his unguarded face she caught a rare glimpse of the man Stefan always insisted was still struggling with himself. _My God,_ Iris thought. _He really needed to hear that he can be a good father. That Stefan wasn't the better man hands-down._ For a second, her second sight caught a flicker of a woman dancing between the Salvatores, and like a lot of stray things she saw with her second-or-third-or-fourth sight, she couldn't tell if it was a real future or just something Damon dearly wanted. But a second later, that vulnerable Damon was gone, and the dancing woman with him. When he turned back to play let's-make-a-deal with Iris, his expression was hard. "It can't be Elena," he said flatly. "That's what I came here to say. Elena can't carry the baby. It's too dangerous, in too many ways."

Iris cocked her head to the side consideringly. "Because of your history?" she hedged.

Damon almost snorted, at that. "No, all-seeing prophetess. There's the little fact that she's the sole carrier of a cure for vampirism that a thousand vampires are gunning for. And a 'baby on board' sign isn't going to change their plan of ripping her head off."

"We can protect her," Iris murmured.

"Oh, yeah? As well as we protected Bonnie? Give me a break, Delphina. That one reason is all we need. I already have one woman carrying my child who got caught by the bad guys who were gunning for her. Another would be downright embarrassing."

Iris had known, of course, that Damon would be beating himself up about what happened to Bonnie. He was so committed to protecting all of them, and Bonnie especially, whom he'd told her once he loved "in his gut and heart and soul," and who was expecting their baby… But she hadn't expected the intensity of self-loathing she saw coming from him.

"Elena's going to insist," she said quietly. She might only know the woman from dreams, but dreams in this case were plenty.

"Let her." Damon's eyes were boring into hers now, and though she couldn't be compelled, she knew a part of him wanted to try. "Because there are other reasons, Iris. Like the fact that we don't know how that cure works, or what might happen if it was transmitted through her to a child she's carrying. And the sleep curse is still hanging over our heads, so Bonnie will come back and Elena'll fall back to sleep the moment the child is born. Just thinking about her still carrying a placenta—"

"OK, OK," Iris held up her hands in front of her face, a little horrified by this suggestion.

"Oh, and not to mention, she only gets to be with us as long as this baby is gestating, so it seems wrong to impose morning sickness and weird hormones and bladder control issues on a temporary visitor to our plane of reality."

"I get it—"

"And yes. Because of our history. But that's because… I don't want Bonnie to come back and find out that my ex-girlfriend, the one I once promised to love for eternity, carried _our_ child. I'm lucky that she loves Elena, too, but somewhere, there's probably a limit, and I'm not super excited about the prospect of getting the woman I love back just to have her dump my ass for the weirdest form of cheating that has yet been conceived of."

Iris laughed, now.

"What's so funny, Seeing Eye-ris?"

"Just—'conceived.'"

Damon's expression cracked open for a split second, and it did Iris good to see it. It always felt like a victory, to make a Salvatore laugh. "Weak pun, I. You're a child."

"On the contrary, _your_ child is the key point," she laughed again. Then she shook her head. "Go get me some liquor. I can't make promises. But I hear you."

"You better do more than hear." She shook her head, reflecting that Damon was never going to stop trying to use her to control the future in every which way he could, and reached for what was left of her vermouth. Then felt his palm grasp hard around her wrist, knew he'd avoided grabbing her palm so she wouldn't have to get up close and personal with his future. Appreciated the kindness. "Iris Morgenstern."

She heard his seriousness, met it with solemn grey eyes. "Damon Salvatore?"

"Is my little brother going to break your heart?" he asked, low. And this hit her right in the gut. She hadn't seen it coming. "I can kick his ass if you want. Just give me a reason."

Iris laughed again at that, but she could tell by Damon's unchanging expression that it didn't make it all the way to her eyes this time. "Oh, sugar," she said, letting her full drawl come out, dropping her guard for him as he'd inadvertently dropped his before. Just a small reciprocal gift; fair was fair. "I knew the first moment I saw him that it wasn't forever." She rubbed her free hand over her mouth, half-consciously, like wiping off some feeling there. "We don't all run away from pain."

Damon nodded slowly, and she saw the drawbridges in his eyes lower again, just for a moment, peered inside there at a man who'd been hurt more than she ever could have imagined. "Just say the word, sister," he said again, low, that last word not lost on her. Then, so fast that her eyes not able to follow him, he leapt deftly over the bar, snatched up the Triple Sec and leapt back to shove it into her surprised palms before she could blink. " _Run!"_ he yelled, a kind of merriment in his tone that comforted her. This man lived for challenges, and if he was playing with Jasper, he'd found enough faith to get through the night.

So, the thunderous boom of Jasper's exasperation, and an ominous crash that followed seconds after it ringing in her ears, she did as he'd asked and ran out the door and up the hill, wanting to laugh again most of the way.

Stefan Salvatore _was_ breaking her heart, just a little bit. It didn't take an oracle to see that he had never loved her the way she'd hoped—nor a vision to see, now, that he never could. And Iris had never been good at lying to herself, so it also wasn't hard for her to see that she'd wanted his love for more reasons than the straightforward ones.

She and Damon had a lot in common.

Tonight, though. It felt like a holiday, the weather Christmas, the portents Good Friday. The mood like a high school reunion. Like meeting a long-lost sister.

She was going to finally meet Elena Gilbert, and then she'd know a little better how all this had happened to all of them. To Damon, of course, and his Bonnie. To Stefan. And to herself.

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )(]**

When Caroline Forbes had first contemplated living for centuries, one of the first things that had occurred to her was that it made marriage, long a horizon she'd thought she'd cross somewhere in her mid-to-late-twenties, seem a little silly. These days, she couldn't imagine making a promise that would last that long. Maybe if there it were term limited—"give it seventy years and we'll review our contract."

She and Stefan had scarcely lasted seven years. And Caroline doubted then and now that she'd ever actually marry anyone. Forever was a matter of endurance, on a vampire's time scale. And she knew it wasn't a universal feeling—but to her, it felt a bit hollow.

Without children, that is.

Still, whenever she crossed the threshold into the Salvatore house after a long journey, she felt like an ex-wife.

There were the candlesticks Bonnie had given them as a housewarming gift when she'd moved in here; she'd never cleaned the candlewax which had dripped down their sides on the first night they'd spent down in the great room, drunk on a Malbec Stefan had been saving for fifty years, and on the heady delight of finding their way to each other, in front of the fire. The living room furniture still sat in the way she'd artfully rearranged it near the end of her residency. Her All-Clad copper pots and pans hung over the kitchen island; Stefan had hung them back up carefully when she'd returned home after her abortion, the one most of their friends insisted on calling a miscarriage as a misguided way of sparing her feelings, and had flung them every which way.

He'd even repaired most of the dents.

She'd noticed many times, now, that her mother's blue crystal flower vase was still on the mantel, and every time she saw it, she thought about taking it home. And didn't.

It had purpose here. It reminded her that she'd spent a lot of her adult life here, had once dreamed of spending a lot more of it, until other dreams interceded. It was her flag, claiming a corner of this house as a colonial outpost of a past she couldn't bear to claim entirely.

Something in her felt a little guilty about that, tonight, as she came inside, shaking off the December cold. Both fireplaces were going; the house was cleaner, more cheerful, more _peaceful_ than it had been in some time. Stefan would never have done it for himself, she knew. He had always needed more reason that that to domesticate himself. Her jaw set at that thought.

"Elena?" Caroline named her guess at the reason the house had changed, closing the door behind her and coming fully into the foyer.

"She's out for a walk with Ollie."

"Oh! Stefan. I wasn't… I guess I wasn't paying attention."

"I guess not." Her ex, the man who was probably right not to forgive her, took her coat out of her hands, hung it up on the coat rack by the stairs. "Vasile agreed to the usual terms?"

This was typical, this wary chill between them. She'd been angry for so long—at herself, at the world, at the serum, and unfairly, at him, at how somberly and stoically he'd taken the loss of a child Caroline had wanted so badly, right up until she'd gotten pregnant with it. He'd learned, in the face of her righteousness and bitter regret, to stop asking her to meet him halfway. He'd learned to stick to the business of how they'd all agreed to fight this war.

"He did. Eventually." Caroline broke their eye contact, irritated at herself for holding it that long. _What are you trying to prove?_ She'd always been one for taunting the tiger. "So… Elena settling in OK?"

That wary chill in the air froze to dry ice; she could feel its cold smoke in her lungs as Stefan took his time answering.

"She's not to blame for this." He leaned on the stair railing next to him, propping an elbow on the banister. His ostentatious lounging seemed to scream, _I refuse to be on my guard because I know I'm stronger than you_. And it broke Caroline's last straw.

"Oh, don't worry. I know she's never the one to blame. For anything."

Stefan's eyes shuttered immediately. If she'd hoped to bait him into a fight, she lost; under his defenses, he just looked tired. "Hey. Come on. You're better than this."

"Oh, no, sweetheart. I learned a long time ago I could never possibly be good enough, in your book. So I don't think you're gonna be able to goad me into trying."

She watched Stefan draw in a steadying breath, and that was worst of all, to see him holding onto his patience like he was talking to a cranky toddler. "What do you want, Stefan? Do you want me to say that I'm happy Elena's here? Well, I'm not. Of course I'm not. I love Elena… despite everything. But she shouldn't be here and I don't see why we should pretend that it's not… not _creepy_ to have her show up for a few months while we figure out how to get Bonnie back, and then go away again. Especially because we're already in trouble, without Bonnie's magic on our side. The last thing we need at this moment is more of the old tug-of-war between you and Damon."

"That's not gonna happen. That's not what any of us wants and you know it."

She almost choked on that. "You have no idea what you want, Stefan."

And now she was gratified. Because now she could see it—the flame of anger burning low at the back of his eyes. "You're confusing your problems with ones that haven't been mine in a long time. I know what I want. But _you.._."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"'I want to be with you forever, Stefan.' 'No, I want to become mortal and have a baby.' 'No, no, forget the baby. I can't wait even _one week_ for someone else to come free me. I want to be a vampire again, and to hell with'—"

"Don't you dare," she breathed.

"Don't _you_ dare to pretend like you made some great noble sacrifice, letting our child die to 'save Bonnie's life.'" He made angry air quotes around the phrase and spat it out like it tasted bitter. "Tyler might believe it, but I'm not fooled. I was there. You hated every day of being human again. You resented all the things you couldn't hear, smell, feel. You hated being _normal_ —hated it so much that you let our baby _die_ —"

Stefan was prepared for the feeling of Caroline flying at him, and he dug in his heels to try to minimize the damage to the stair railing. _What is it, the fourth time we'll be repairing this damn thing?_ He pivoted quickly, shifting his weight forward, letting her feel how many decades stronger he was, pinning her in place against the foyer wall.

"You hateful bastard," she whispered, and he'd never seen such hatred in her eyes before, not even when she'd told him she was leaving because she couldn't bear the sight of him refusing to mourn their baby with her.

"I know what I want," he said to her again flatly. "And I know sometimes it changes. I know I can't always have it. Because I know how dangerous I am." His elbow at her rib cage dug hard enough to bruise. Not that it would last.

"Is that what you're telling yourself? Still? After all these years?"

He shook his head. Then, seeing the mutiny fading from her eyes, he dropped his arm from where it was pinned across her shoulders and throat. "We're vampires, Caroline. You walk around like you believe those signs in factories and coal mines are a promise. 'Thirty-eight days without an accident.' _Just because we haven't had one for a while doesn't mean we're safe_. We're just in a storm with a lot of eyes."

Caroline stroked the ragged seam where Stefan's body had split open the bannister railing, pictured for a moment using it as a stake and driving it into Stefan's inscrutable heart, the heart she'd wanted so badly to know and which he'd, if only in its deeps and at its edges, kept from her.

She had needed so badly for him to have already solved himself. But maybe it was time to feel a bit of pity that he'd come so far only to stop and rest here. _Idiot._

Did she mean him or herself?

"You're no more dangerous than Damon," was what she said. "Do you resent his happiness? Do you think he should leave Bonnie alone even though she's the air he breathes, and vice versa?"

Stefan looked at the ground a long moment, and when he looked up, there was something like a small smile she had to try to fathom. "I have no idea why you can't see that I'm a lot more dangerous than my brother," he said gently. "If you could just wrap your head around it, it might help you forgive me for having been afraid of all the things you wanted."

Caroline took that in slowly, half accepting it was his truth, half rejecting it because it had nothing to do with hers. But she never found out what would have said in response, because the door flew open.

And there was Elena Gilbert, fourteen years on.

Damn, she hadn't been paying attention _again_. Terrible habit even if the estate was magically walled.

Elena had just a hint of the night's frost clinging to the scent of her. Behind her, Ollie, her almond-shaped eyes watchful, looked like she often did, as though she felt she were interrupting and was stifling the urge to apologize. And to see them together, time swirled around Caroline again, became all incomprehensible.

Caroline found herself looking to Stefan helplessly when she spoke. "My God… she looks _exactly_ the same…"

Elena smiled her heart into her eyes. "I could say the same about you," she teased.

Caroline knew that wasn't true. Oh, there weren't any lines on her face. And her hands—hands were always telling—would simply never age out of teenagerdom. But even for vampires, eyes could become hard, expressions could become set. And Caroline had seen herself in the mirror.

"Never say it," she managed. "I can only stay here as long as most locals see me getting older. Hence, the haircut, the clothes…" she flicked nervous hands at her chin-length bob and her well-tailored business skirt. "Oh, Elena."

Elena moved to embrace her, but Caroline had only intended to put her hands on Elena's arms, to look more closely at her face and convince herself she was real. Caroline scrambled belatedly into Elena's hug, just as Elena moved away, embarrassed that she'd misread the gesture.

"It'll get easier with alcohol," Iris opined now from behind them in the doorway, sounding out of breath. Thank God for Iris; Caroline had at least heard _her_ running up the sidewalk. "I'm Iris Morgenstern. Favorite color's green. Really into marine mammals. Miraculous oracle who sees the beyond by day, bringer of margarita supplies by night." She waved the liquor bottle in her hand. "And I guess you're Elena."

"Yeah," Elena said, feeling a genuine smile creep onto her face at the redhead's droll introduction.

When Iris just stood and looked at Elena for a long, long moment, everyone in the room but Elena understood she was swiftly reading everything she could see of Elena's coming days and weeks. She slowly shook her head, and Caroline fought the urge to put her arms around Elena again, this time protectively. Finally, Iris shot a swift, unreadable glance at Stefan, but then smiled very slowly. "I see… a hell of a party in your future." She raised up the bottle in her hand again.

"Thank God," Elena took Iris's hand innocently, not knowing that to do so was to press Iris close up against her dreams, her will, what others willed for her. "At least that much hasn't changed."

Iris was pale, now, but she just dropped Elena's hand wordlessly, slipped her arm easily around Elena's shoulders and squeezed. "I know it's awkward that I've been in your dreams. We'll get through it."

"She always does," Ollie smiled. "But… Stefan. It's ladies' night." She smiled apologetically. "You're a bit superfluous."

"Trust me, I can feel it," Stefan muttered. Caroline hoped he did. He didn't so much as glance at her. "I'll be back to crash. Try not to totally wreck my house this time, ladies."

But even he knew it was not going to be that kind of party. More than that, actually. Seeing his last glance at Elena, Caroline would have bet money that he wasn't going very far.

Caroline felt a hard tug of pity, like a small hand deep in her heart was tugging up an anchor in her gut. And then for the first time since they'd left each other, she found, despite herself, that a little part of her wanted to be Stefan's friend again.

But a little more of her called that part a fool.


	8. Chapter 7 A Sword in the Stone

_What you want to say most_  
 _is inadmissible._  
 _Say it anyway._  
 _Say it again._  
 _Every question_  
 _is a leading question._  
 _Ask it anyway, then expect_  
 _what you won't get._

-Lee Robinson, from "The Rules of Evidence"

* * *

 **Chapter 7. "A Sword in the Stone"**

A half hour later, Caroline had gotten ahold of herself in her usual way—through taking action. She blended up the margaritas, deftly diced up crudités, covertly slipped a bag of blood, type AB, into an opaque cup for herself. It had been a long flight and she hadn't been able to bring herself to feed.

Now, she summoned an artificially bright expression as she carried the tray into the living room, where she saw that Elena was also pretending to be happy, chatting with two women whom she'd never imagined at the moment she fell asleep.

Like so much else about Elena, it was a pretense. Just now, all her pretenses seemed to Caroline to be worn quite thin.

"…and yes, she was about two weeks late, but I wanted her to cook as long as needed to," Odie was finishing with a smile in her voice. The three women were bent over a photo album. Lennie's baby photos, Caroline guessed. The ones she'd left for Elena at the trunk. She grimaced. _That's sort of rubbing her face in the problem,_ she thought. But she supposed it couldn't be avoided.

"I came to tell you about your niece in your dreams." Iris handed Elena an olive branch.

"I don't remember," Elena said to the photos, her heart in her throat.

"No, of course not." Iris shared a quick, worried look with Odie. "It would have seemed like any other dream. But you were happy, in this one. You said you always knew Jeremy would grow up to be as loving as your dad, as wise as your mom. I told Jeremy and he…"

"He cried like a child," Odie finished, her own eyes bright. "And it became his… his parenting mantra." She squeezed Elena's hand. "Honey. Your faith, your example—they saved him when your parents died, gave him the strength to go on once you were gone. You didn't just save his life. You made him the man I love."

"And that's more of eternity than most people get," Elena said, sounding to Caroline like she was quoting someone, faintly ironically. "But I still wish I could have been there."

"Me, too." Odette really meant it. Caroline knew Elena couldn't hear all the shades of the years behind it—the months Odie had kept asking out Jeremy, who'd been convinced after Elena disappeared that he was also cursed and would be better alone. The year she'd spent talking Jeremy into marrying her despite his insistence that he couldn't do it until they'd lifted the curse. The uncountable number of times over the years that one or the other of them had said to her husband, _It's OK. Elena would want you to be happy, you know._

But the girl who'd been dreaming couldn't hear any of that, of course, and it shouldn't be her burden; Caroline knew that. Or anyway, she mostly believed it.

Still, it was irritating to watch both of them rush to comfort Elena. It itched in a place Caroline had never quite scratched.

It itched more when Elena took it upon herself to set the evening's agenda, filling her lungs with a deep breath of the present. And looked up and met everyone's eyes. "We need to talk about Bonnie's baby."

"Damon and Bonnie's baby," some devil in Caroline made her correct.

Elena's face stilled, even as Iris surreptitiously reached for her first margarita. For her part, Odie simply closed the album of photos of her daughter, let her hand flutter to her own abdomen. "I explained to Elena that I can…I think I can remove the baby from Bonnie's Pegacite. But then someone would have to carry it."

Elena's face set. "It should be me. Bonnie's my best friend." She darted a nervous glance at Caroline. _Is she still measuring obligation in terms of who her besties are?_ Caroline told herself to be patient; Elena was an adult, even if she'd missed a decade and a half of personal development. "I'm only back because of what… what happened to her," Elena went on. "And I don't have any other obligations. I mean—I have nothing else I can _do_."

Caroline kept her tone even. "Damon has some fairly persuasive objections to your carrying his baby." Elena's face stilled.

"Including some kind of graphic ones," Odie put out hesitantly.

"So he pitched that placenta bit to everyone," Iris laughed. "I should have known he wouldn't trust the whole argument to me."

"What's the whole argument?" Elena was not amused to be the odd woman out.

"In summary," Caroline offered gently but firmly, "it's an unfair burden to you, a horrific danger to the baby on account of all the vampires after your cure, and… it would make Bonnie jealous. Which is true. She and Damon have been together longer than the Beatles were, but you've always been a little bit of Yoko Ono in the middle of their band. Sorry."

Elena had taken in a lot of information today. And she thought she'd borne it all rather well; she hadn't slapped Damon's face for impregnating her best friend while she was asleep, and she hadn't crawled into Stefan's bed and asked him, pathetically, to hold her because she was scared. She had let Jeremy explain to her how he had worked all these years to protect _her_ , when Elena knew in her bones it was supposed to be the other way around _._ She had driven through a town battle-scarred from a war over _her_ cure, and she hadn't even cried while Ric and Matt had given in and answered her questions about how the fires had spread, and who had died where. She had looked at the house they had built on the site of the one she'd burned down, and all she had asked was how many bedrooms it had, and then let them tell her what was in each of the subcellars. Rather than sleep, she had read two full volumes of Stefan's journal; and she'd read the first twice.

Elena was past her congeniality threshold.

"Yeah, well, excuse me for not breaking up with Damon _well enough_ when I suddenly was cursed into decades of sleep. My mistake, obviously. Sorry for not pre-emptively bottling up a cure—one that Bonnie insisted I take—and making sure it wasn't spelled into a crypt with me. Sorry for not just staying asleep for five more decades so the rest of you could get on with saving me over and over and over again without any inconvenient visits from me in my Ghost of Christmas Future costume—"

"Whoa there." Caroline held up a hand now. "I know you're reeling. I know that it hurts that we all… kept going. But you know there was nothing else to do, Elena. You _know_ it. You told us to do it!"

"You knew you had to give up your baby to save Bonnie," Elena murmured devastatingly. Odie gasped, and Iris buried her face in her hands at that, muttering something that sounded like _just went nuclear._ "It still hurt, I bet."

Caroline's heart froze for the second time that evening. "You have no idea," she said warningly.

"Don't I?" Elena let out a hollow laugh. "I've lost an awful lot, you know. Try me."

Iris, who'd been at the bar for several hours before she'd shown up here, let out a nervous giggle. "What the hell is so funny?" Caroline snapped.

"Everyone just calm down," Odie intervened.

"Calm is pointless," Caroline said, just as Elena objected, "I've just been accused of breaking up the Beatles!" as though it were the worst of all that she'd heard today.

Now Iris was outright laughing. "Yeesh. I wish y'all could see what I do."

"And what's _that_?" Caroline snapped.

She meant in particular, but Elena, of course, had no idea in general. "What do you see, Iris?" she asked softly.

Iris let her one hand rest easily on Caroline's shoulder, reached over the other to the side table for her frozen margarita, slushily melting. She decided to answer Elena's question instead of Caroline's. Though both were treacherous. "Well. It's like this, Elena. I can concentrate and sift and sort and read and reread the images and auras that just kind of woosh, zoom in from the dream plane, all around everyone. And so I can figure out some things about the future, from seeing which of your dreams, and what from others' dreams about you, sort of… get hard, and stop wooshing. Which ones stay." She met Elena's eyes meaningfully. "It is easier when we touch hands. So probably you don't want to high five me."

"Got it," Elena said faintly.

"But. Without trying at all, at every moment of every day, waking and sleeping, I can always see what people _want_. It shines through long before the future comes." She took a long swallow of her margarita, and Caroline finally realized that Iris was more than a little blitzed.

God. The oracle drunk and in a mood to talk. This was never pretty. But maybe… maybe it would be instructive for Elena?

"What people want is bright and clear. For example. Odie wants Jeremy to stop coming back to Mystic Falls so that their babies are safer. For example," Iris began. Then she threw a hand over her mouth, trying to stop herself from giggling again."Whoops. Didn't mean to spill the beans."

"Babies…?" Elena asked. Had they been keeping something from her?

"We weren't ready to tell everyone yet," Odie whispered, looking down at her lap.

"That explains your tonic and lime on ladies' night, at least," Caroline muttered. This was far from the first party that the drunk oracle had sunnily ruined. She wanted to hug Odie, whom she'd come to think of as her own sister. She wanted to be generous enough to be happy for Odie for having _another_ baby, but… that feeling felt like a wooden platform on the horizon while she was treading cold water.

Visible, but a hell of a long way off.

"And you, Caroline," Iris turned and Caroline froze.

"Don't," she bit out, the word as sharp and purposeful as an ice pick.

"Tonight, you want Stefan back just so you can be the one to reject _him_. So you can be the one to tell him he's cured."

"Seriously, Iris—"

"But most of the time you just want Tyler Lockwood to lockwood you up in his cabin in the woods. If you know what I mean." Caroline's face flushed red. Iris was not a poet.

Still, Caroline definitely knew what she meant.

"Iris, you are crossing-"

" _And_ that's what Tyler wants, too, but he thinks he's alone." Iris tossed back a cold swallow of her margarita, licked its salted rim reflectively as if she weren't dropping bombshells left and right. Iris shook her head. "I know what you want to know, Elena. And… I don't know if Damon will ever love you again. I can just tell you what he _wants._ He wants Bonnie back. He wants her safe, his kid safe, and he wants you to forgive him once you have a chance to think about it and to mean it. And I think… tonight, I thought maybe he still wanted Katherine to choose him, just once." She frowned, and waved her hands in the air to clear it. "But he's easy. I can read what Damon wants like a book. Not like..." she trailed off, now, some of the mischief leaving her eyes.

"Stefan?" Caroline guessed. Then their eyes each slid on a parallel track across the room.

Iris smiled grimly. "The ex says his name to the girlfriend… and we both look at Elena." She took a deep breath. "What I love about Stefan is that he's not like anyone else. Because… I can't see most of what he wants."

Caroline shook her head. Even though Iris had supernatural powers, that somehow didn't surprise her. "Yeah. I never could either."

Elena's eyes were shadowed, but Caroline had no idea what she thought of that; she had looked away, toward the fire.

"That's because," Iris finished painfully, "his wants are like a sleeping bag rolled up tight as knots in a bag buried in his gut. If he ever lets them out they'll make even Ric's look gossamer-thin. And trust me, that's saying something." Odie, shivering slightly now, sank onto the hearth, her back to the flames.

"I want to know your future, Elena. I want to know it badly. A lot hangs in the balance with you." She reached out and grabbed Elena's hands, squeezed them hard, a comfort but also a question. "But honestly, I just… it's the same here as it was in your dreams. You're like Stefan. I still have no idea _what_ you want. Because the thing about you is that you just— _want_. And want. And want. Like an octopus, tentacles of wanting flailing out in every direction, trying to fill up some ache inside that I can't see the bottom of."

Elena let out a startled gasp, and Odie broke in hurriedly. "That isn't kind, Iris."

Caroline leaned back heavily on the couch. "Why should Elena be spared? It's true. And Elena needs to hear it, or she's not gonna be able to figure out what to do next. This isn't a fairy tale any more, where her kindness saves two princes from themselves and her noble sacrifices save a kingdom and she's rewarded with eternal love." She brushed her hair out of her eyes. "She's not the hero of some endless story that tests her courage and endurance. This is real life, and there are no morals and no protagonists. Right now it's Bonnie's life that needs saving—Bonnie and Damon's love at the heart of it—and Elena needs to see what it's like to just… be on the team, with the rest of us. Not the hero. Just another foot-soldier."

"You think I don't know what it's like to make sacrifices?" Elena demanded. Then she gripped the sides of her chair, as if to hold herself down. "No. You just think I'm a selfish bitch regardless of it."

Caroline shook her head. "I love you. I always have. And yes, you are selfish—you had to be to get through the bad couple of years you had before you fell asleep. And honestly, it was exhausting, to always be a bit player in the ongoing story of Elena's life, love, family being threatened, and to never be allowed to help in the ways that mattered. But now things are different." She sat up, leaned forward, hunched over her elbows on her knees, more graceless than Elena had seen graceful Caroline look since her bloody, terrifying transition. "And I get that you're taking in a lot at once, but. Elena. Honestly. It really is selfish to be angry at Damon for falling in love with someone else, for me and Stefan for moving on together, at Jeremy for not waiting to ask your permission to marry his wife. Because… _you_. Every photograph I took! Every word Stefan wrote in his journal! Every trip Damon and Bonnie took abroad, every year, every day, you were with us, Elena, looking over our shoulders! So now that you're back, you don't get to feel like it was some goddamned betrayal!"

Elena was pressed back into the couch, her arms folding around herself protectively. She was holding these words in, clutching them tight. She couldn't have explained why she felt so relieved, to hear she was in the wrong, to hear that someone else _knew_ how selfish she was.

But Caroline wasn't done.

"We didn't _need_ you to survive. And you know what—no, Odie, she needs to hear this. There were times when all of us— _each of us_ —wondered if it might have been easier if you really had died. Do you know how many nights we talked about it?" Caroline pulled her legs up underneath her, now, and Elena fought to pull air into the her lungs, even as her relief came stronger. "I mean, can you even bring yourself to think about how many vampires have been killed—how many _I've_ killed, and Ric, Damon, Stefan—how many people were killed because vampires were looking for you? We saved Mystic Falls. And you, the sleep-cursed cure-carrying albatross around our necks. Oh, and we saved ourselves, too. So. Yes. We need to figure out what to do about the Pegacite. Together. But it's not important to me or anyone that you think you 'have to' carry Bonnie's baby because you're her 'best friend.' This is about more than your love and your heroics, Elena. It's not your story anymore." Caroline had hit her stride now, her words relentless and gaining steam with years of frustration. "You're just a fact now. You're not Arthur. You're the sword in the stone. You're not Harry Potter, Elena! You're a goddamned Horcrux! So—no. No, no, no. You don't get to decide."

Elena was crying, though she didn't know it. Odie looked like Caroline had hit her instead of Elena. Iris had her back to the gathering, bent over the bar, seeming to be giving them privacy, or thinking about something else entirely. And Caroline was flushed with fury, with the adrenaline that followed from letting go of what she'd been holding onto for the last decade. _Your great gift_ , she thought bitterly, remembering that Matt had once told her she was congenitally incapable of keeping her feelings to herself.

Odie's voice, when it broke the stillness that had fallen over the room, was a bit tremulous. "Elena isn't to blame for our mistakes—any of them."

Iris cleared her throat. "As a point of fact. She also isn't to blame for not having been here, not having to do what we did."

Caroline buried her face in her hands. "That's not what I meant. I just meant—this isn't her world. It's ours. All of ours. She needs to get that."

"She's basically a time traveler, Caroline. She's lost." Iris was ill-equipped for this business, for talking anyone down off an emotional ledge. When you could see the future, you felt guilty enough for what happened without actively trying to intervene in what you _couldn't_ see. "She's got bigger problems than you know. You can't turn back time. I've tried." She swallowed hard. "Time resists."

"I think you're missing the point," Caroline said thickly.

"I'm not." Elena's voice was flat but firm. "I hear you, Caroline. I want to be on the team. This is about Bonnie. I get that. I would do anything for her… I mean it. For _her._ It's not about what I've lost…"

"Like hell it isn't," Caroline said tiredly.

While they'd been talking, Odie had stood up in front of the fire that had been warming her. She stood there for a long time, watching the dancing light of the flames cheerfully swallow up their wooden fuel. Now she looked to Iris, and the two women silently conferred for a long moment, whether through their gifts or through their friendship, Caroline didn't know. Then it was Iris who spoke.

"Yeah. Yeah, Elena probably does need to be the one to carry this baby."

Caroline's brows shot up. "Did you not hear any of Damon's very sensible objections? Did you not agree to the opposite of this plan?

Odie spread her hands out entreatingly. "There are practical reasons. As Iris saw… I'm already pregnant." She waved a hand as the room attempted to muster something like congratulations. "Later. We'll celebrate later. But I'm out of the pool. So to speak. Caroline would have to stay on serum the whole time, and we all know that that's… sorry, Caroline, but it's dangerous. And we would lose your strength."

"My strength doesn't come from being a vampire," Caroline said firmly. This was a keystone of her whole being.

"It's still way too dangerous, to go on vacation from vampirism. And Iris…"

"Iris would lose her vision," the woman herself interrupted.

Caroline's brows shot up even higher, preposterously. "How do you know?"

Odie made a scoffing sound, as if to say, only fools ask a prophetess how she knows something about the future. But the answer stunned all of them.

"Because I had a baby once," Iris said softly. "And I couldn't see any other future the whole time I was pregnant. And when it all came rushing back… after… it nearly destroyed me." She cleared her throat. "And a lot of other people. Trust me. You don't want that."

Elena was looking at the ground, and Caroline could actually see that she was fighting the urge to lay down on the floor; her eyes had become dark pools. _Thank you, pity,_ Caroline said to herself. _It helps to know I'm not drowning alone._

"You didn't tell me." She felt almost as hurt by Iris as sad for her.

"I did something better," Iris reminded her. "I stood by you, and Stefan, when something like it happened to you," she said. Then she pressed her lips together. Got tough. "Caroline, Elena carrying this baby is more than a—big, showy, gesture of self-sacrifice. It's a commitment, a great personal risk with no great benefit. And it doesn't make it her... her _story_."

"I want to do it for Bonnie," Elena cut in, her eyes darting nervously to Odie, and then to Caroline, and then to the fire. "I want her to know—when she's back—that she's still one of the most important people in the world to me. That that much hasn't changed."

"That's the problem," Caroline gritted. "It all _has_ changed. But how could you know it? You won't even give yourself a week to try to figure it out before you go leaping off another bridge."

There was a long silence. "I deserved that," Elena said finally. "For what I said before. About your baby."

Iris put her oar back in. "But Damon's objections still stand, and we need to have answers."

Odie sighed. "He has some good points, but I have to say… The Pegacite was built around the sleep curse; it had to be. So it's sealed up all of Bonnie's life, but then again her life was already bound to Elena's."

"What's the bottom line?" Those were Caroline's favorite lines to draw.

"It's actually an extra layer of safety. Bonnie and Elena tie each other life even while one of them is, well, basically dead. There's a thread of magic, as strong as any life force I've ever seen, between them."

Elena seemed to be struggling for breath. _Does she think she's alive for Bonnie? Or instead of her? Which does she want?_ Caroline wished her friend were easier to fathom.

"There's a political upside, too," Caroline said reluctantly. "To Elena carrying the baby." She'd seen it immediately, but she'd looked away. Let herself be the petulant teenager that Elena made her. She sighed.

Now it was Odie's turn to puzzle. "Which is?"

"The Alchemists hate all vampires. But they want Bonnie's baby. They may ally with us… as long as it's Elena, who holds the vampire cure, that's pregnant…."

"You're saying that they'll help us stave off the vampire attacks that will come once news that Elena's up and walking around leaks out." Iris shook her head. "They're the ones who did this to Bonnie. Damon won't want their help. Hell, _I_ don't want their help."

Caroline met Elena's eyes, and her heart eased a bit when her old friend seemed to understand her, and nodded. "That's short-sighted," she told Iris gently. "And we can tell Damon that. We'll get them in the end—they want to use this baby, and we can't let them. And they stole Bonnie, and we can't let them get away with it. Obviously. But if a hundred vampires descend on us at once, it'll make last year's war look like army training camp."

"Everything about Elena carrying this baby is unacceptable to Damon," Iris said slowly.

Odie shook her head, now. "It's not the only concern. _Elena_ needs to think about this still. And so does Damon. And you both should talk to Jasper about it."

Elena sank slowly to the couch next to Caroline, and even more slowly, she let her head fall on her old friend's shoulder. "You always tell the truth," she whispered. Her tone said, _You're the real magician here._

Caroline let the feeling she was regressing ebb away. She'd done the right thing, she thought, even if she'd done it the wrong way. She put her arm around Elena, too, and leaned together, let her body say she was sorry for not having been kinder. If part of her was still angry, and another part felt Elena's presence here opening up an old wound, and a third part thought it would be a disaster, well, she could silence those with the part of her that had missed her friend, the first one she'd made in kindergarten, for a very long time. "Someone bring us some margaritas," she said instead. "Elena. Tell me everything. What was it like to wake up alone in that crypt? I want you to know I _told_ them to put you a bed instead of a coffin, but…"

" _Vampires,_ " they said in unison, ignoring that Caroline was one and Elena had been one, ignoring all the dark places in the air between them. And then they both burst out laughing.

Iris took this strange sight in, instead of attending to what she was still bleeding within herself. An old habit. When she cocked her head at them, Caroline didn't let herself wonder what wants and dreams and futures she was seeing. Odie, meanwhile, had knelt to her purse to pull out her grimoire, which she kept on her cell phone, to start thinking through Pegacite surrogacy witchcraft. But not before she poured margaritas for the two old friends.

* * *

Long after the ladies should have gone to sleep, they were sitting up spilling stories over the fire. Damon and Stefan were surprised to hear their laughter ringing into the winter night as they came upon the house. They walked into the great room to the sound of Caroline saying, "…broke a Lockwood desk for the fourth time, and I thought, I cannot compel that poor antique furniture repair man _again_ ," after which Odie, Iris, and Elena dissolved in laughter. Damon felt Stefan tense lightly beside him, but when he looked to meet his brother's eyes, found he was staring at Elena.

 _Damn, Stefan._

That was what longing looked like. Damon, who'd spent much of his day with witch doctors at Bonnie's bedside, knew the feeling well. He had just never seen it plainly on his brother's face.

If anything, that look hardened his resolve on the proposition Stefan had brought to him earlier.

"We're gonna break the sleep curse, too," Damon broke the news without other introduction to a room that had gone silent when they'd stepped, grim-faced, inside. Elena's laughter winked straight off her face as Damon spoke aloud a conviction which had been this group's guiding light in the first years after she'd gone to sleep, a conviction which had never gone away, for any of them, even as they'd exhausted their ideas for how to get the job done.

"We've been mulling it over. You're not going back to sleep when Bonnie comes back, Elena," Stefan agreed. "We can't live with it. Because…" He looked hesitantly at Caroline. "Like Caroline's always saying. We're in this together. All of us." He hoped she would hear the peace treaty he was offering her.

Whether she did or not, Caroline pumped a fist in the air. "Damn straight!"

"I'll envision Elena tomorrow," Iris said breathlessly, though she was looking at Stefan a bit helplessly as she said. "Elena, I'm gonna need a couple of hours in the morning."

"Afternoon," Damon contradicted, his eyes narrowed on the shadows that had gathered in Elena's eyes at the news they were going to try to fight to keep her with them. "She's gotta see Jasper in the morning." With Stefan's clap of a hand on his back came a knock at his consciousness; he let his brother in. _You're gonna have to fight her for it,_ Stefan said.

 _Oh, you can bet I will,_ Damon told his back.

Now his brother cleared his throat to the room. "There are some notes," Stefan reminded them, "in my journals. About what we have and more importantly, what we haven't tried. I've been thinking about it. Something Kai said to me before the wedding…" He shook his head, not knowing himself what was bothering him, and knowing this group was too deep in its cups to deal with it yet, anyway.

"I've been thinking about the sleep curse, too," Odie looked up from the notes she'd begun scrawling in the margins of a grimoire page. "I think it's possible the Pegacite is an opportunity the likes of which we've never had."

Elena buried her face in Caroline's shoulder and took slow, deep breaths, timing them with Caroline's steady heart. She felt her friend's hands come up around her tightly, lovingly. "It might not work," Caroline murmured cautiously. _Could it be, after all, that I'm worried about her getting hurt?_

Caroline, who'd become a bit petty where Elena was concerned, didn't want to give herself that much credit.

"I know that," her friend said. "But it's worth trying," she said, forcing herself to smile. "It feels good just to have a chance."

It was surprising. So much of Elena was at war, frantically ignoring or suppressing other parts, that it surprised her that she could tell she was lying.

She glanced up and found Stefan's green eyes trained knowingly on her.

Elena didn't even understand her own thoughts anymore. Because as she looked away, the words rattling in her head felt sharp and loud, but inexplicable.

 _Please please please. Don't let him see._


	9. Chapter 8 Red Flags

… _What you fear_ _  
_ _will not go away: it will take you into_ _  
_ _yourself and bless you and keep you._ _  
_ _That's the world, and we all live there._

-William Stafford, from "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid"

* * *

 **Chapter 8. "Red Flags"**

It was Tuesday morning, so Stefan was where he went Tuesday mornings: the right side of the loveseat in the corner of Jasper Rhine's office in the attic room of Ric's house. Today, he had a mug of coffee in hand, his navy winter coat tossed on the seat beside him. Jasper was long since retired as a psychologist, so he no longer split up his workday into fifty-minute hours. They often talked straight through until lunch. Over the years, they'd developed something of a pattern. They would talk about Stefan's mental health, sort through what was on his mind. They'd talk about business, since Jasper managed the bar for them. And then they'd talk about whatever one or the other of them was reading.

But this morning would play out differently.

"Elena called," the old man told him through the pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth, as he lowered himself into his beat-up leather chair.

The doc did it all easily; becoming a vampire had taken all the creak out of his octogenarian joints, the ache from his muscles. He'd started smoking the pipe twenty years ago, after he'd seen wizards and hobbits do it in _Lord of the Rings_. ("I just knew it was for me," he'd told Stefan years ago, and Stefan had laughed harder than he had in ages, to know this gruff, austere old Lutheran man was deliberately mimicking Bilbo and Gandalf.)

That it was only eight-thirty in the morning didn't stop Jasper now that he was a vampire whose risk of mouth cancer was nil.

"She wants to see me," the old doc continued. "Says Damon has made it a condition of even considering letting her carry the baby."

Stefan grunted. He knew all of that. He'd been the one to suggest it to his brother, and he'd been there when Damon had shouted her down about it. Shouting was the wrong word, actually. Just chided, mocked, scolded, nitpicked, and then started outright ridiculing. _He can't tell that you're crazy just by looking, Elena. It'll take at least three minutes worth of conversation._ "She's not gonna be your best patient," was all he said.

Jasper sighed. "None of you would win awards. But yes. I'm guessing the self-sacrificing savior of Mystic Falls could be on the Damon end of the 'impossible to treat' spectrum."

"She'll put Damon to shame."

"So glad you two commended her to me." Jasper looked down at the tablet on which he jotted down observations during his session and frowned at whatever his last notes were. "Well. But how are you doing with her return, Stefan? It has to have thrown you."

"I…" Stefan shifted uneasily as the understatement hit him.

Normally what he liked about these sessions was that he didn't have to hide anything, dress it up, or pretend. It felt so good to just say the truth, uncensored, unmodulated. Jasper knew every dark thought he'd ever had, had heard every black desire. He'd listened compassionately while Stefan described the faces and last words of people he'd killed as a ripper. Had asked questions about what it felt like to kill them, before, during, and after, designed to help Stefan understand what had driven him, how it had changed him.

And the doc didn't pretend that Stefan or _any_ of them were innocent of sociopathy. In fact, Jasper's insights about the ways in which vampire society was pathological were a big part of what had inspired Stefan to start thinking and talking about big-picture reform. Once he'd gotten to work saving himself.

Now, though. This was more shameful than the ripper stuff. Than his fights with Damon, his anger at his parents. Than resenting Caroline, after the abortion. Than all of it put together.

"I think I'm still in love with her," he said finally. Flatly. Without looking up.

Jasper was quiet a while. Not unusual, that. "With Elena?"

"Yes. Of course with Elena."

 _Of course? What about Iris? And how many years has it been, Stefan? How many more will it take you to get over this?_

But all the doc said was, "OK. What do you mean by that?"

"I mean… I mean that…" Stefan usually liked this part, this cracking open of feelings that otherwise rolled around like barrels on a low deck of a ship in a storm. But this one felt like it was smashing open on his inner walls. "Well, that I want to be around her. Almost compulsively. I have to make myself give her space. I feel like I'm always, I don't know, always looking for her. And that what I want is to touch her, to hold her, to _be_ with her. To protect her, which is impossible right now because pretty much every new thing she learns about the years she was gone, hurts her. I want to just be able to talk to her, and keep talking. To hear her and then hear more. To see her look at me the way…" Stefan swallowed, because his train of thought had forked, and down one road, his sentence was _the way she used to_ and the other _the way she looks at Damon._

"And you're upset. That you feel this way."

Stefan let the coffee he was drinking sit on his tongue for moment. Though he always drank it black, it tasted especially bitter this morning. His mood, he suspected, more than the brew. "As far as she's concerned, I'm the dear friend and ex-lover she rejected in favor of Damon, and Damon's a guy who broke her heart a couple of days ago. Never mind that it's been many years, for the rest of us. She's in the middle of a breakup. She's raw."

"You don't want to compete with Damon again."

That wasn't a question, but Stefan answered it anyway, immediately and resolutely. "I won't."

"So you're upset to have these feelings because you think she won't return them."

"No. No, that's not it at all. She can't handle this. She doesn't need to be burdened with my feelings on top of everything else right now."

Jasper clicked and unclicked his pen on the red leather arm of his chair. "I see. And do you?"

"Do I… need to be burdened with my own feelings?"

"Yes. Given everything else that's happening right now."

"Do I have a choice?"

"Well. Isn't that always the question?" Jasper lips quirked up, but it wasn't a smile. "Do you remember what I diagnosed you with, when we first met?"

"Of course." Stefan was unlikely to forget. It had felt like he'd gotten a key to the code that had been bugging his whole system. "You said I had one of the worst cases of PTSD you'd ever seen. And that since you used to work for the V.A., I should be flattered."

"And so you did. You had seen so many people die."

"Killed so many people."

"As usual, your way of facing facts leaves no room for being generous with them."

Ignoring Jasper's advice about self-forgiveness as usual, Stefan ran a hand over his jaw. Was surprised at his own stubble. How had he forgotten to shave this morning? That's right. He'd heard Elena getting ready, had gone out for a run, hadn't wanted to crowd her.

Every moment was already intense, he could tell.

"There were a lot of parts of the diagnosis," he said slowly. "I thought PTSD was all night terrors and flashbacks and jumping when someone drops a book on the ground. Something only veterans got."

Jasper's brows shot up. "You also keep forgetting that you're a veteran."

Stefan scowled. "It wasn't even the most violent thing I did in the twentieth century," he muttered in reference to his service in Europe in the Second World War.

The doc seemed to want to argue, but decided to stay on topic. "What would you say your symptoms were?"

Stefan didn't hesitate. As soon as he'd gotten a diagnosis, he'd started researching post-traumatic stress, and writing about it for himself, trying to be intentional in treating his own problems. _Isolation, Sense of Danger, Guilt, Self-doubt, Memory Displacement, Hopelessness._ It had all seemed so simple, on a bullet-pointed list. Each point had represented a huge chasm between the man he wanted to be and the man he was.

He spoke his symptoms more literally than the list had. "I held myself aloof from everyone. Was—was afraid of them getting to close. Because I felt like I was a danger to them. I worried about hurting people, about people getting hurt." He touched that stubble again, wishing he'd been willing to just go in and get his razor, shave and have a normal morning. _Elena. What am I going to do with you, this time?_ "I didn't trust my instincts or gut reactions. I felt guilty. I was emotionally numb, not feeling all of my feelings. I had memory problems sometimes. And I didn't have any hope it would improve."

Jasper nodded. "We haven't revisited that diagnosis in a long time, Stefan. Should we now?" The old man liked to involve him in the direction of their treatment. "Do you think some of those symptoms are… persistent?"

Now Stefan's mouth felt dry. "You think I'm… what. Having some kind of relapse? That my feelings for Elena are a symptom of it?"

"No, no. Not exactly. But many of your most traumatizing events, including the one you told me about the first time you ever came here, involved Elena Gilbert. More importantly, your relationship took shape at a crucial time in your life, when you were transitioning out of decades of comparative solitude into being a functional brother, friend, and partner. They were character-establishing, all part of your response to a need for belonging you'd been fighting for… well, pretty much your whole life. Hence they're building blocks of how you see yourself now."

"OK…" Stefan thought about that. It didn't sit well. "So you just think I can't know what I really feel for her." You had to know Stefan well, as Jasper did, to hear the thread of anger in his tone, and so to intuit the thick vein of it that he was suppressing.

Jasper leaned forward. "Just the opposite. I believe you love her, intensely and almost overwhelmingly. That feeling is most definitely real. I just think it's important that you remember that you've loved others, now, and done it rather well. Because _this_ love may not be healthy for you. And that's what I want you to consider." Stefan let those words settle in before Jasper landed his next blow. "Tell me again about that night. The night you told me about when you first came to my office." Jasper believed he should be transparent when he was fishing, so he added, "I'm wondering if you see it differently, now that you've seen Elena again."

Stefan sucked in air through his teeth instinctively. The story still gave him a little trouble with breathing. Especially when he thought about it unexpectedly. "We haven't talked about that in years. I don't even dream about it anymore. Usually."

"So tell me."

Stefan ran his hand up and down his abdomen, felt his muscles jump under his own hand. His stomach was churning. _You can't change it, Stefan. Just face it._ "Well. It was the end of a bad few months. I'd gone off with Klaus on a killing spree. My third."

"You mean that you made a difficult bargain to save Damon's life."

"Don't… don't dress it up for me." Stefan knew that some of his personal narratives were wonky—that some of the stories he told himself about his past were needlessly dark, and told in ways meant to punish himself, and do it in ways which would satisfy a conscience which refused absolution. He knew he could be kinder to his past self.

Just not about this.

"So I had killed those seventeen people." Stefan knew all of their names, now, and Jasper did, too, if only deep in his notes. "And then almost killed Elena—bit her at the dance. That night, I wanted to drink her dry. I had wanted to drink deeply of her for so long…" he trailed off. "I crossed every line. Hated myself. Especially hated what I'd liked about doing all that. And so it took a lot for me to come back."

"By the night at the river, though, you were back. Had been for a little while."

"Yeah, but obviously things were not the same. Between me and Elena. She knew I still loved her. But I couldn't trust myself near her—even less than I had before—and she… let's just say she had realized Damon was actually the safe option, at least subconsciously, by then."

Jasper made a low sound in his throat. "Come on. We've been through this, Stefan."

"Right. Yes. Elena's comparisons between me and Damon don't have to be mine. I know that. I do." Stefan scowled. "You're right, she's set me straight back fourteen goddamn years."

Jasper held up a quelling hand, albeit one still wrapped around his ballpoint pen. "This is you, Stefan. It's not her. So just tell me. That night in particular. Why were you on the bridge?"

Stefan looked down at his hands, which seemed to have folded themselves together without his asking. "I wasn't. It's not that far from the cemetery. Not far for our ears, anyway. And I'd gone to the cemetery to see my father."

"He was on your mind that night?"

"He was always on my mind, in those days. I hated him. I was terrified I was just like him—you know all this, you're the one who told me it was… transference, right? I was transferring my self-hatred onto him so I could deal with it. I was guilty about what I'd done to him. And the damnedest thing was, in those days, just after that ripper spree, it was the first time I'd realized there was a ripper in him, too." He took a breath. This was difficult. It helped him forgive his younger self, actually, to know that it was still difficult after all this time. "So I went there, to the crypt, trying to get a handle on everything that had happened, how much I wanted to hate Damon, and yeah, how much I hated myself. How everything had gotten so out of control. And that's when I heard that colossal splash. Matt's truck hitting the water. Like it was straight out of the past. A year before, all over again."

"And you ran for the river and dove straight in."

"Of course." Stefan would never count all the times he'd used his powers for good—had run into fires, stopped car collisions with his body—against all the times he hadn't.

"Of course." Jasper kept his face carefully blank. "And so it's all on your mind—your father and the ways he failed you and you failed him, her father asking you to save her the previous year. When you found Matt and Elena. Like your very own nightmare."

"Yeah. A nightmare. That's exactly right. And you know the rest. Elena—she didn't want me to save her. She kept shaking her head—no, no—and pointing at him. And I… God. I still hate thinking about this, even after all we've…"

Jasper studied him thoughtfully as he took a puff of his pipe. "Come back to the present. Tell me something. If Damon and Matt were in the path of a train, and you could only save one of them, who would you save?"

"Matt." He didn't even hesitate. "Damon could save himself."

"But let's say that he can't."

Stefan buried his face in his hands. "Damon, then. I would save Damon."

"You're sure of it."

" _Yes_. I mean, I'm still, you know, I'm not my brother. He wouldn't take even a single second to think. It's simple for him—just save the one you love best, no questions asked, because the decision is really just raw hedonism, just straight animal instinct. And maybe not stopping to think would give him the extra split second he needed to save Matt, too."

"He's not a superhero."

"Yes, he is." Stefan paused, had a revelation. "We all are, sometimes."

"Yes… I suppose you're right." Jasper scribbled something on the pad on the arm of his chair. "But you're saying, even today, you would still take a moment to think about it."

Stefan blinked. He loved that phrasing—loved how it revealed to him that he was the one "taking a moment," when he always felt like the moment was taking him. _I pause for reasons,_ he thought, drawing in a quick breath. The next thought was even more liberating. _The reasons have changed._

"You know, that night, with Elena, I was still so afraid of the beast within me. So I screwed up. I couldn't trust my own judgment. And that meant that I let _her_ demons do the choosing." _Why did I do it? Why did I let her die?_ That was the tortured question he'd brought to Jasper's office twelve years before. And this, this was the answer that had come over time. He spoke the truth that had made him a monster again now. "So that night, I let her commit suicide. By my hands."

Jasper sighed, and Stefan heard what sounded like pity in it. Jasper felt the heaviness of the problem like he did. "You didn't know she was suicidal?" the doc asked finally.

"I should have figured it out. I mean, we all knew she was compassionate, self-sacrificing, and brave, but… The pattern beneath all of that was that she just didn't really believe she deserved to live as much as the rest of us. Wouldn't fight for her own life if there was a hint of a way to give it up on our behalf. I didn't realize it until later, but… I had opened the door. You know? There was a way out. But she didn't make a move for it, didn't even try to get her seatbelt off." Stefan shook his head. "She stayed in the car. Once Matt was safe, she insisted on drowning." He gritted his teeth to cage the memory of his terror. "And we all just went on, as though she hadn't killed herself, just because she happened to come back to life."

"Everyone else didn't know what had happened. You did."

"Yeah."

"And that moment changed your relationship."

"Oh, yeah. Completely, utterly. After that, I didn't trust myself _or_ her. She had wanted to die. I let her. Damon was right. I was insane." He blew out a breath. "And so was she. But after that, I knew it."

Jasper was frowning now. "But what I don't understand is—you didn't think to tell Damon?"

Stefan scoffed at that. "Yeah, I can see it now. 'Damon, she needs a life raft. Keep telling her she's your reason to live so she keeps herself alive for you. It would be a big favor.' That would have gone over well."

"You thought Damon would save her."

"Damon would have pulled her out of the river first. He would have killed a dozen strangers to save her life, in those days, without blinking. He was so stopped up he wouldn't even have let himself feel regret. You didn't know him then, but… well, you can imagine."

"Indeed I can," Jasper murmured. And he had, many times, in endeavoring to understand the puzzles represented by this little clan of misfits. "But now, you're saying, you would choose to save her. If it happened again."

Stefan nodded slowly. "I still don't know if it's right, you know, ethically. I love Matt like family, and he would be dead now if I hadn't done what Elena asked." He looked up, met Jasper's deep brown eyes with deep-spring-clear green ones. "But I know what I did was _unnatural._ To let her choose. To bury what _I_ wanted, to let the person I loved most die. At the time, I was so screwed up that I thought that maybe saving Elena wrong _because_ I wanted it. But I don't feel that way anymore. About what I want."

"Give me some reasons you would give Elena if she asked why she could trust you with her life. Today." This was a game Jasper often played, to stage hypothetical conversations and force him to articulate positions he might not otherwise take.

Stefan thought for a while. "As long as my feeding schedule is relatively normal, I can walk through a burn unit without being terribly tempted to feed on anyone." He dug deeper. "I have put my life on the line for all of our friends a hundred times. I would die for any of them. For her. Of course I would. Any of us would, for each other."

"Is there any reason she should trust you more now than she would have back then?"

Stefan was already halfway to the realization that Jasper's question hinted at. _Yes. Of course. I've become the man she used to believe I was._ "You know, she told me once—'you should love the person who makes you want to live.' And what I would tell her is, she was wrong. Totally wrong. Was looking in the wrong place for a reason to live. She could trust me because… I want to live, now. Not for her, or for Caroline, or for my brother. For myself, because I'm a person who I know is worthy of all of those people's love, because there are things I want to do in the future, for them, with them, but also just for myself. It didn't used to be true. But she could trust me because I'd fight, and fight hard, for my _own_ life, on its own terms, if my car went over a bridge."

"Do you think she can say the same?"

Stefan felt that question lodge in his chest and turn his lungs to rock. "I doubt it." That wasn't true. He _knew_ she couldn't, knew that much hadn't changed.

 _You should love the person who makes you want to live._ God, it sounded like such a sad joke. Elena had wanted so badly to have a reason to survive.

She'd loved only in order to make herself want to live.

Stefan had understood this. He had a doctorate in understanding the dynamics among himself, Damon, and Elena, he'd thought about them for so long. _Damon will keep her alive,_ he'd told himself back then. And with some help, he had. _Now, though…._

"She fights for the rest of us, but if it were just for herself… I still don't think she'd believe she had anything to fight for." He sighed. "That's why I lean toward thinking Damon should let her carry the baby. She would fight to keep Damon and Bonnie's baby alive, and by extension herself. It would buy you some time."

"What, you think I can wave my magic wand and fix her if I have nine months?"

Stefan reached into the breast pocket inside his coat. He pulled out the card he always kept tucked there. "This isn't a magic wand," he said. _Jasper Rhine, M.D., Ph.D._ , the card said, followed by an address in another town and an old phone number with only ten digits.

Jasper, well into his retirement, had come to town to look after Alaric a while, more than a decade before. He'd met Stefan for the first time, down at the Grille, on one of Stefan's black nights. Talked to him. Drank with him. Saw him through. Then gave him an old business card. On the back he'd written, _I may not be as old as you, but I've seen my share of shit. Let me know if you're willing to take some help in dealing with yours._

It was the first time he'd sought help outside of their little clan since Elena had fallen asleep. It had taken all the courage and all the hope he could have mustered, to knock on Jasper's door.

"When you told me vampirism was just a chronic disease—that I was just a person with a disease who had to learn to manage it—that it was also the _least_ of my troubles—you changed my life." Stefan leveled his eyes seriously with Doc Rhine's. "You can fix her. I know you can. Because you did it for me."

"Ha," Jasper snorted. "You're a work in progress at best."

"Don't I know it. But I wanna believe you can help her." Stefan got up now. "That this time she won't be able to just look away from her problems. She's downstairs, you know. In the kitchen. Pacing around. Nervous about what you'll see." He reached down for his jacket.

"I hear her, too." Jasper usually liked to end their sessions by testing him, and today was no exception. "What would you ask her to talk about, if you were me?"

Stefan didn't hesitate. "Ask her about the night she burned down the house that used to stand here."

He didn't wait for Jasper's response. He was ready to face what he'd avoided earlier this morning.

And he just, after all, wanted to see her. Fourteen years without being able to look into those eyes had been a long drought.

"No, Stefan. I don't think she's ready for that yet," the old man muttered to an empty room.

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )(]**

She might not have had vampire senses anymore, but Elena could recognize the footfalls of either Salvatore without a problem. So she heard Stefan come up behind her, but didn't bother to turn around. She was staring out Ric's kitchen window at the yard which had once been home to her old red wooden playset, to Jeremy's sandbox that had been painted like a turtle right down to the little feet, to her mother's vegetable garden, to her father's hostas and roses. Now it was home only to a deck which was bare except for a chipped old barbecue in need of scrubbing, and two weather-worn canvas loungers. The landscape was all but unrecognizable. Only the tree in the far northeast corner had escaped the blaze. A black oak, she thought. That was something.

"Damon and Ric spend evenings out there once in a while, watching the neighborhood, shooting the breeze," he said quietly, believing she was looking at the empty chairs.

She wasn't. Something else entirely was on her mind. "You know, Stefan, I've never asked, but I guess you guys must be millionaires."

Stefan reached around her for the coffee pot, still half full as he'd left it, refilled his cup. "Money's not really relevant when you can compel just about anyone to give you just about anything."

"I'm just saying. Why didn't you build a pool out here, or at least do some landscaping?"

"A big old pool on a teacher's salary?" Stefan shook his head. "It's Ric's house, remember. We didn't want people asking questions. I wish he would've fixed up the yard, though."

"Ric's house." She shook her head. "I wanted Jeremy to have it. The land, I mean."

"He came to me about selling it, Elena. Asked if I thought you'd mind. We bought it from him, me and Damon and Ric together, so he didn't have to worry about it not being there for you, when you woke up. Invested the fire insurance money for him. And he used the dividends to pay for graduate school, and the money from the land to put a down payment on his house up in Quebec." He paused a moment. "We tried, but he wouldn't just take our money when we offered it to him. He was furious when I paid his tuition one year, and didn't speak to us for months after he noticed Damon had been siphoning microdeposits into his checking account."

"He was raised right," Elena murmured.

"He sure was."

She tore her eyes away from the yard, looked at him with the light of challenge in her eyes. "Tell me about Jasper."

Stefan didn't hesitate. "Born and raised in northern California, spent the first half of his career working for Veteran's Affairs up in Oregon. Treating vets and their families at first. Then he went into private practice, specialized in disorders stemming from bereavement—depression, anxiety, things I don't understand. Attachment and fixation disorders. Stuff like that."

She took all that in, heard what Stefan wasn't quite saying. _You should trust him. He's seen it all._ "What happened to his family?"

"He had a daughter. Gwendolyn. Gwen, he calls her. She was killed—hit by a car crossing the street in Seattle. Around thirty years ago. She was about thirty herself, at the time. The grief nearly drove him mad, he told me. Almost destroyed his marriage, too. And his wife, Annie, she passed away… let's see. Less than a year before he came to Mystic Falls, so must be thirteen years ago, now. Cervical cancer, I think. We never met her." She heard the subtext again, here, even felt it. A little. _He has lost as much as you have, Elena._ "So he came out to visit the family he had left. Alaric is his great-nephew. His sister's grandson. When he found out about us, he took our backs when it counted. And then just…stayed."

"And now he's a vampire?"

"Yes. Only vampire I know who was a practicing vegetarian before he started drinking blood." Stefan drew a deep breath. "Caroline turned him. Not long after we lost the baby. Jasper was already pushing ninety, but said we'd given him a new lease on life, a new problem to solve—vampire mental health issues. Especially ours." He smiled wryly. "You might have noticed we've got plenty going 'round." He hitched himself up on the counter, took a pull from his coffee. Same coffee, but it tasted like cinnamon, this time. _Damn it_ , _Elena. I don't want this. Not now._ "Damon and I were conflicted, and Ric was opposed to turning him. Dead set against it. But Caroline said he was one of us, and it was his choice. She was… Let's just say that, after the abortion, choice had become especially important to her."

Elena bit her lip. "You think you'll ever forgive her?" she asked quietly.

Stefan had had harder questions this morning. "Maybe not entirely," he said after a moment. "Anyway, not yet."

"What I don't understand," Elena returned, very softly, whispering as though she thought it meant Jasper wouldn't hear them, "is why you said at the end of your last journal that she was still the 'lightning in your veins.' When you can barely stand the sight of her."

"It's not like that, Elena." He reached over Elena's head, now, to get another coffee mug, this one for her. Poured it only three quarters full, to leave enough room for her almond milk. "I'm angry, sure, but Caroline is family. Forever. And our little clan is like any other family, Everyone plays a different part. Damon our hands and shoulders, Ric our intellect. I try to be our conscience. And so on."

"Do everyone," Elena said, fascinated. "What about Matt and Tyler and Jeremy? Bonnie? Iris and Jasper and Odette?"

Stefan leaned back on the cabinets. In his gut, he was charmed by this. It felt like old times, when he and Elena first started dating. She would challenge him with metaphors ("what colors and symbols would you put on a crest for each of the founding families and why?"). They would write each other joking notes about classmates, back and forth, write little fairytale stories about their friends—Bonnie as a unicorn, Tyler as a panting dog. He'd felt young—no, not young, just like his life was… interesting. Worth noticing.

So it was dangerous, but he let himself get drawn into the shine in her eyes. "Well, Matt's our... he's our feet. Just metaphorically. Connects us to the outside world, keeps us from being stuck in place. Tyler's our sense of adventure, the thing that sometimes makes us… daring. Jeremy's our curiosity, that's obvious. He's never had a problem he didn't end up in the middle of. Iris is our eyes, of course—she sees more than just the future—and Jasper's like our immune system, always policing, keeping us healthy from within. Odie's the family's memory, keeps our history, tells us when to remember to be cautious. And Bonnie…" he hesitated, weighed whether it would hurt her. Decided he was past that concern. "She's our center, the thing that holds it all together, keeps it all in balance. Our soul. It's not like we're not glad you're here, but—"

"No. I know. That's really… right. Wonderful." Elena surprised him by accepting the metaphors as plain fact. "And then there's Caroline. You're still in love with her, aren't you?"

"No," he smiled, and if his tone sounded rueful, Elena chose to ignore the reasons that might have sprung to her mind. "I'm not in love with Caroline. But she _is_ the lightning in my veins—in all of ours, I think. She's our will, Elena. Our determination to carry on no matter what, and not just out of duty, but with actual joy." He shrugged, but not the nonchalant kind—the kind that said that what he was saying was actually too heavy for his shoulders, so he needed to carry it somewhere else. "Even if I haven't forgiven her, I understand her. And I trust her. She's everything I never believed a vampire could be."

 _I could never have been that, as a vampire,_ Elena thought to herself, stricken to feel a pang of jealousy welling up within her. _And why not? Why was I such a terrible vampire? All that had to be different was drinking donated blood, right?_ There was an answer there somewhere deep in the dark at her core, but she never, ever reached in there and didn't now. So she asked her other question aloud. "And where do you think I fit into the clan, Stefan?"

He smiled. Met her eyes. Held them. "You're our heart, honey." He let his words linger just a little on the last word, and Elena felt them low in her stomach, which seemed to have a horde of small hungry butterflies fluttering in it, even as her heart lurched. "You're there in the reasons we find to love each other, to take care of each other. You're what makes us about more than ourselves." His voice went as gentle as it ever had, now. "Which is why you've got to start taking care of yourself, Elena."

"I'm trying," she breathed back, her stomach clenching again as he leaned very close to her… only to press the coffee mug into her hands, and fold her fingers around it. But he was close enough that she could feel his breath on her face when he spoke again.

"You're gonna wanna lie to Jasper."

She hadn't expected that, but she was used to dodging emotional blows. Her lashes shot down to screen her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"It'll seem like he sees too much. And then eventually it'll annoy you, what he doesn't see, what he misunderstands. You'll wanna test him, see if you can get away with lying to someone who you'll resent precisely because he's trying to understand you and you don't want to be understood, because then you'll have to confront yourself. Maybe have to change. So you're gonna wanna lie. I'm saying, it's kid stuff. Don't lie. You can trust him with the truth."

 _What do_ you _see, Stefan?_ Coffee mug in her hands or no, her hands felt cold. "I didn't ask for Jasper to become my new best friend and high confessor, you know."

"No, but listen, Elena. He literally saved my life. Because I was honest with him." He paused for a long moment, seeming to debate with himself. The thing that won made his eyes turn liquid. "Elena, honey," he let himself say it one more time. "You can't keep lying to everyone forever."

An arsenal of her defenses sprang into places, weapons and shields and a high wall, faster than Elena could blink. "What the hell are you even…?"

He squeezed her shoulders, just briefly and very hard. "Please."

"I don't know what you…" she began, but then he pressed a hand over her mouth. _Please don't see,_ she thought wildly.

"Lie to me all you want. Tonight, tomorrow, next week—tell me whatever you need to. But just try to tell Jasper the truth. Please."

 _Absolutely not,_ she thought. _Not him, not you, not anyone. It's for your own good. For mine. I can't keep going if people know how much I don't want to. I'll fall, and I'll never be able to make myself stop._

And then, bewilderedly, _what the hell was that?_

"I'll try," she said aloud.

He shook his head, and she knew he saw through her. "Ask Jeremy about your half of the property revenue," was all he said. "He kept it for you, invested it. Last I heard, you were worth close to half a million dollars, yourself."

Elena's jaw dropped. "He… that's… what?"

"I'll see you back at the main house, Elena." And Stefan, apparently done with her half-truths, turned and left, each footstep seeming louder for how nearly silently he moved himself.

Like always.

She looked at the staircase balefully, knowing Jasper had probably heard all that, knowing he was waiting. _I'd rather go back in the crypt,_ she thought.

It didn't occur to her to wonder why she felt like she meant it. She was very good at avoiding questions like that one.

 _Maybe I'll just go down to see Bonnie instead._

 **[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )(]**

Damon and Odette were already with Bonnie, six floors below. Though Damon was not above listening to Stefan's sessions with Jasper when he felt like it—almost a form of therapy in itself, he thought, though decent people had those conversations in bars and not doctor's offices—this morning he found himself rather preoccupied with the sight of the glaringly bright stone at the center of his girlfriend's rib cage, seeming to shout at him all of his own failings.

Bonnie was lying now atop a grey comforter, still in the white cotton shorts and green silk blouse she'd been wearing when the Alchemists had caught her. The braided silver, yellow gold, and rose gold necklace Damon had given her on their first anniversary was around her neck, a rose gold watch she'd bought herself to match it on her wrist. She was motionless. All but the terrible sound of the ticking second hand on that watch. Completely and utterly still, still like the blue and gray rock, dark and dense enough that light couldn't penetrate it, which was holding all of her life force within it.

He hated that damn stone. Her whole life was walled up in there, made fragile by being given a container simultaneously so much weaker and so much stronger than the mortal body of a witch.

"…so I think I can use the sleep curse thread that's tying Bonnie to Elena to move the baby out of the Pegacite," Odie was concluding. "If the two of you can come to an agreement. Even after that, we'll need to wait for the right time of the month."

Damon, his eyes tracing the curve of Bonnie's cheek, made himself glance up. "Full moon as usual?"

"No, I'm actually talking about Elena's menstrual cycle, although I bet she'd rather I didn't. But as I well know," she huffed out a breath, "pregnant ladies lose a hell of a lot of privacy."

"Right… God. OK." Elena's period, funnily enough, had once been a fixture of his months, one that made their love life a terrible challenge—all that blood and tissue. It had usually a reason to stay away from her, and why he was grateful Bonnie had had an IUD, until recently. Damon rarely let himself consider downsides of being a vampire. But he did hate it that a woman's period could deter him from sleeping with her in the twenty-first century. Still, he wasn't Stefan. He didn't run pointless risks just to prove he was strong enough to confront them.

Well. Not usually.

OK, at least not the same kind that Stefan did.

He could see now, calling back to him across the years, a vision of Elena laughing and pulling him into the apartment she'd shared with Caroline and telling him, as though his senses weren't on high alert about it, that her period had started. _I'm not worried,_ she'd said. _I believe in you_. To think of it now, of how much it had meant to him that she'd believed… God, she had been insane to believe. Waving a red flag at a bull, practically literally. _What was I thinking?_ It made Damon feel a terrible inverse of what he felt when he pictured himself tumbling into bed with Katherine. Thinking that he could prove to her he was a better lover, a better man, than his brother, that _this time_ would be different.

Thinking of Elena Gilbert's period, now, at Bonnie's bedside, somehow, made him feel every one of his hundred and eighty-nine years.

"So I'll figure it out," Odie was concluding, "gather up the couple of other things I need, and… you think about it. And talk to Jasper."

Damon nodded slowly. "But I need to talk to Bonnie first." Ridiculous as that seemed, an oration masquerading as a dialogue. He needed it. He lowered himself down on the bed next to the woman he loved, ran a slow hand over the hair at her temple. God, she would be annoyed if she saw what a mess they'd left it. _Looks beautiful to me, Bon_ , he thought to himself, recalling that it had just been last week when she'd delayed a dinner date for forty-five minutes to let some product set in it. _Vanity, thy name is Bennett,_ he'd mocked. "Thanks, Odie-o," he said softly. "As always—we couldn't do this without you."

"Same goes, Damon." Odie hovered in the door just a moment. "Let me know when you want to talk parenting advice."

Damon drew in a hard breath. "Yeah, I'm not there just yet. But… you'll be the first to know. You know I want yours and not your idiot husband's."

Odie grinned. Damon's harping on Jeremey's recklessness was a way he showed his love. "See you soon, champ."

When he heard the door close, Damon let himself settle down into he crook of Bonnie's arm, cold and stiff as it was, opposite from where he'd tucked her teddy bear the morning before. He felt ridiculous; he knew it did no good to be here, but until he could think straight enough to do what he knew he had to, this was all he had in him.

"Bonnie. God." He reached out, wanting to rest his hand where he was used to resting it when she slept, curled up against him at night: just over her sternum, under her breasts, against her heart. But that goddamn stone. "You're the best person I know, sweetheart. The bravest. The person who has always, always come through for all of the rest of us. Even for me. Even when you didn't like me. When you were right not to like me. So I know… I know you'll come through this."

He was glad it had occurred to Odette to install a painted light box window on the wall, because it was hard to leave each day, leaving Bonnie this far underground, away from the sunlight she loved… even though he knew it was the right thing to do, and the safest. The glowing picture, incongruously of tulips and a cypress tree, two things that would grew together nowhere on earth he'd ever seen, relaxed him. Reminded him of himself and Bonnie. Vampire and witch. Hell, she was a black woman in America and he was maybe the only person alive who'd served in the Confederate army.

They had grown together against a lot of steep odds.

That let him say what he knew he had to.

"I think Elena's gonna be the one to carry our baby, Bon." He let the words hang in the air, let every part of himself hear them. "I'll be on hand while it happens. It's gonna be… really weird. I mean, I think it's a good sign that, after everything that's happened, I'm mostly worried about what it's gonna do to Stefan." He felt a little relieved to say this aloud, to let this train of thought take him away from his other worries. "I can't lose him. And I suspect our warrior-poet still loves her, Bon. Like you said—we can't see into his corners when his light's not all the way on. But maybe she's brought back the light switches this time. One for Stefan, one for herself."

There was so much dogging Damon today that he had to struggle to continue. "Speaking of lighting up. Remember that day in Borneo? You'd just returned the nautilus pendant to those radical old witches, you remember. Their coven leader had piercings that still haunt me. And they invited us to that bonfire celebration. And then they all ran off when the nautilus told them their ancestors had returned, and left us there, and I… and we…"

Damon swallowed, feeling like speaking aloud what had happened there would only trivialize it, reducing it to words instead of what it had been, which was magic. "I wish I had told you I loved you before then. I did, you know. Love you. I know you know, but do you know how long? Since Kandahar. That was when I knew it. I shouldn't have needed all that fire and starlight to say the words. I was a coward. I should have told you the second I realized it. On a cliff in rural Afghanistan. In the middle of that fight we were having about whether to keep looking for the Aronian scroll or to move on to the _next_ impossible way of lifting the sleep curse."

Damon looked up, caught the artificial glow of the light box shifting from morning to mid-day well above the cypress or its flowers underfoot. Smiled. "You said that if all I wanted was for you to keep my bed warm until Elena was back in it, I could jump straight off the cliff. And I thought… God. I'd forgotten we were doing it for her. I had started doing it because _you_ needed to live without the guilt of Elena lying cursed with every breath you took. Because you had done everything for her, for me—over and over again—someone needed to finally take care of you. And as soon as I realized that I wanted you to be happy more than I wanted Elena back, in my heart, I knew I loved you beyond anything I could have imagined. But I was afraid I could never convince you, so I waited, months and months, for all that starlight… I was an idiot." Damon pressed his lips to her forehead, ignoring the rigidity that made Bonnie's skin feel horrifically like the dashboard of a car. This wasn't death. He wouldn't fear it, wouldn't think it, even though he saw it, felt it. "Be honest, though," he challenged his cursed lover. "You know the starlight helped my case."

He pulled Bonnie up gently, eased himself behind her to hold her a while. He was suddenly very glad that they had left Bonnie where he could reach her. It was telling, he realized suddenly, that they had collectively conspired to spell Elena out of reach.

 _We needed to find out who we were without her._

A heady thought. But one for another time. "You said no promises, Bon, no ceremonies—that you were never gonna marry me. I'm still gonna wear you down on that front. But for now, let me just promise you this. I'm going to be there for our baby, every step of the way. I know you'll want that. And I'm going to figure out the Pegacite, and stop the Alchemists from doing whatever screwed-up hell-brained thing they want to our baby, and also stop vampires from killing the baby along with Elena for this damn cure. And at the end of it all, I'm gonna do whatever I have to do to finally lift the burden of this sleep curse off your shoulders, so when you wake up, you and Elena can both be here. And then you can know, really know, that you're always gonna be first with me. And we'll work hard for her forgiveness. And raise our baby. Together."

Damon's focus had been so absorbed by Bonnie that he hadn't realized he wasn't alone until he heard something in the hall. The protections spelled onto this basement would only have let a handful of people come down. He concentrated a moment to the breathing, the heartbeat, all the other biorhythms he could pick up on. Sounds he knew as well as he knew anyone's.

 _Elena_ , he thought. His own heart pulsed hard. And harder, when he heard her struggling on a barely audible shaky breath that sounded like it was trying to swallow a sob.

She'd heard him, then.

"We'll work hard for her forgiveness," he repeated to Bonnie at a murmur.

He knew he couldn't comfort Elena—had fought to gain that knowledge and let it sink in deep before she'd ever opened her eyes back up. Still, out of kindness, he said the rest silently.

 _I'm gonna start a lifetime's worth of paying you back for saving all our sorry asses all those times, Bonnie. By loving you for every minute of your life. So you never doubt it._

It didn't matter that he couldn't say it aloud.

It wasn't like Bonnie could hear him anyway.

The sound of Elena's feet clambering up the stairs sounded to Damon like an echo of their past. Well. No. It was just the sound he'd always expected to hear, back then, and Elena had been cursed not to live long enough to deliver to him. _Oh, Elena. I wish you could have stayed awake so we could both come to see what we needed from each other. And then see we'd already gotten it._

Elena would be OK, for now. She'd be on her way to Jasper.

Regret, guilt, and raw fear for her stole through Damon now, to think of what the old man might face if he cracked open Elena Gilbert's walnut-thick shell.

"I think it would probably be better for all of us," he told Bonnie, letting himself sit with a feeling he would once have ruthlessly ignored, "if I don't listen in on _that_ , either."


	10. Chapter 9 With Abandonment

**Author's Note** : I'm on a hiatus for the next two weeks while I finish up a real-life project. But... I'll be thinking of you all the while? :) Your reviews and messages are so welcome.

* * *

 _I believe you can build a boat.  
_ _I believe you can get to water.  
_ _I do not believe you can get the boat on water.  
_ _Because there is no boat and there is no water._

-Jennifer Michael Hecht, from "Steady, Steady"

* * *

 **Chapter 9. "With Abandonment"**

After hearing Damon pour out his love to Bonnie, Elena didn't let herself cry for very long out in the hall. She was terrified that Damon might come out to comfort her, or worse.

He might not.

So she took herself up out of the cellars and into the house, to Alaric's master bathroom on the first floor. And she cried there just a little longer, because she wasn't trying to win awards for courage, just hold it together enough so she didn't have to actually see anyone pitying her.

Since Elena had woken up, she had come this far: she knew that Damon's love had been something like a boat. She knew she had been afraid, once, that she would sink him. She knew she had been equally afraid that he would capsize with her aboard. She knew that both of those—the vessel to sail in, the possibility of disaster—had been the whole point of getting on board.

Now, though, there was no boat.

In open water, she was just drowning.

But Elena, whose lungs had once filled up entirely with river water and starved her brain of oxygen, knew drowning very well.

 _So get it together. You can't face a psychologist looking like this. Not and convince him that you can do what you know you have to._

A splash of cold tap water didn't undo the traces of what had happened on her face, let alone in her eyes and voice; that would take time. So Elena, apologizing to Ric under her breath, locked herself into the master suite, and threw herself down in his ottoman by the window. _I just need a damn minute._

She had stopped at the Salvatore crypt this morning to pick up the rest of the contents of the trunk her friends had left for her, intending to move it to her bedroom at the Salvatore house. Now, she was carrying the second of the twenty or so volumes of Stefan's journals to her. This one started up about six months after the sleep curse had taken effect, that first winter.

Maybe Stefan would have some news from the past—about Bonnie, or Damon, or… anything.

Something that would change the way it felt to watch a boat, headed home, sail away without her aboard.

 _Elena—It's been… I guess it's actually been a good week. Relatively, of course. I don't know if I told you before that I've gotten involved with the historical society. On account of your mother's work, they asked Jeremy to present the annual award this October; he asked Bonnie since he was going to be off at school; and Bonnie kicked the ball to me because she's down in Charleston this month, passing more of those crazy tests to gain full membership in her coven. I normally avoid this sort of thing, 'cause there's always a chance that I'll know a little too much about historical events and people will notice. But I thought you'd want one of us to do it. For your mom._

 _I'm so glad I did. Because it led Connie Fell to ask me to come in and start helping her organize some of the town's old papers. There are so many people I know in the pages here. For example: I hadn't thought of old Albertina Maxwell in, well, let's say I haven't thought of her since the last time I caught a Brahms concert on the radio, which would have been in the time we still called that new invention "the wireless."_

 _Miss Bertie. God, she was a character. When Damon and I were kids, she would come out to our house on Mondays and Fridays for piano lessons, but whenever Mother and Father weren't around, she would teach us and Paulie and Georgia—the house slaves, though we called them servants—how to play the banjo, all together. The banjo was Miss Bertie's favorite instrument, and she was a genius at it. She wrote her own music and even invented a kind of mandolin._

 _Turns out she left her whole musical collection to the town. All those beautiful old instruments, sitting in dusty boxes in the historical society basement, labelled with tiny little accession numbers—all that's left of a life. No name, no pictures, no stories. Just instruments which no one plays and a tall stack of yellowed sheet music._

 _I brought home Chopin's Waltz in A flat major, which Damon once knew by heart; maybe he still does. It's the song Father always asked for when he wanted to dance with Mother after dinner._

 _Damon was the musician, of all of us. He had such a gift for bringing those waltzes to life._

 _Hell. Just between you and me, I'm running out of ideas for how to break through to him. He's not doing well, Elena. He's gotten ruthless, like the old Damon, seeming to always be just one desperate moment away from snapping a civilian's neck to gain some temporary advantage. He's obsessed with breaking the sleep curse. We all are, but Damon's… I think he's actually lost his wits, Elena. He went a whole week without feeding recently. Said he forgot, but in a tone that just meant he wasn't going to answer questions about it. I suspect he likes the edge that his bloodlust gives him._

 _Since Miss Bertie's banjos and Chopin's Revolutionary compositions probably won't break the sleep curse, I doubt he'll have much time for them. I'm not counting on a miracle. Besides, I have another angle; looking for magical artifacts buried in the town archives is the reason I agreed to this gig to start with. Still, seeing Miss Bertie's collection helped_ _me_ _._

 _Connie Fell was surprised at my interest in it—"an unusual love of history in one so young," she told me, and it was worth having to compel her to forget to tell her that her great-great-grandfather was two years behind me in school. And then I felt bad, so I agreed to help her with the research for an exhibit on antebellum entertainments here in Mystic Falls. I could tell stories that would make her clutch her pearls in horror. Just to hear the old songs again—"Gentle Annie" and "Do They Miss Me At Home?"and "Abide With Me"—I remembered a hundred things I'd long forgotten. Do you know that we used to go to church every week? Catholics from the old country, the Salvatores, but my grandparents saw the writing on the wall and "converted" to Methodism before they ever got through customs, and then married their sons off to good Anglo-Saxon English girls. (Good thing, because I don't think they let Catholics be founding families in Virginia in those days, or pretty much anywhere else in America, for that matter.) Anyway, Miss Bertie was our church pianist, of course, and a lapsed Catholic Irishwoman herself. I remembered today that she once brought down the house by transitioning out of "Sweet Hour of Prayer" right into "Whiskey in the Jar." Old Addie Lockwood stamped her feet straight through and then laughed until she cried. We were all laughing by then. Well, maybe not Reverend Torvel. But then again nobody could resist Miss Bertie's good humor for long._

 _I suppose, whenever it is you read this, you'll wonder why I'm telling you stories from my childhood instead of stories from what you're missing right now. It's just hard to keep writing about what we're doing—digging a deep hole in the ground below where you used to live, to build an arsenal and prison cells. Failing to find anyone who knows how to break the sleep curse in a way that won't get you and Bonnie killed. Drilling ourselves on what to do if someone attacks the crypt._

 _It feels good to learn how to make an exhibit, I'm saying._

 _Anyway. I'm heading out to your parents' lake house later today. Will probably stay the night. No one winterized it and I'm afraid the pipes will have burst—we had a big cold snap this week. I'll stay out to see to repairs if need be. And I'll be more careful with it next year._

 _No. Maybe we'll break the sleep curse. Maybe you'll be back by next year. Here's hoping._

"I won't be," she told past Stefan. "You'll have to do a lot of winterizing."

There was something about reading Stefan's journals. Their calm, straightforward explanations for her; their meandering stories as he discovered something for himself. Their scrolling, old-fashioned script that was a legacy of having learned to write around the time Millard Fillmore was president. Their steady regularity, written at least once a week and sometimes in between if something struck him or something unexpected happened.

Well, but Elena knew this now, too. If Damon had been a boat, then Stefan was like her; he was an anchor.

If she'd held onto him, they both would have drowned.

She drew a deep breath. _Steady—steady._ The journals helped. Miss Bertie Maxwell helped, too.

 _Go fool the old shrink upstairs so you can get on with saving Bonnie,_ she told herself sternly. A bit of Damon in her intensity, her mental cadence.

And her feet obeyed.

* * *

Jasper had his feet up on his footstool, a copy of the third volume of the autobiography of Mark Twain open in his lap, a pipe drooping out of the corner of his mouth, when Elena knocked on the open door to his attic office.

"Dr. Rhine?" Elena asked tentatively. It occurred to her that it had been a long time since she talked to anyone his age. _That's ridiculous. Stefan and Damon are each twice his age._

But they were going to be young forever, and this vampire would be old forever. He looked, in fact, like a Scandinavian Alan Ginsberg, aged past his worst madness and back into clarity, but still wild. Elena hadn't realized until she saw him how comforting it might be to sit with someone who actually knew that he was of a different generation than hers. It was a contradiction, maybe, but she felt herself, suddenly.

"Well. Elena Gilbert, after all these years," Jasper murmured, sliding a bookmark into the hardback volume and setting it on his side table.

"That's me," she said, hoping he couldn't see the remains of her crying fit. _He's a vampire, Elena. He probably heard the whole thing._ But as usual, she could maintain appearances until she knew for sure. _That's all that courage is._ That was one of her most successful lies. It helped her summon a smile, now. "I guess you've heard more about me than I have yet about you."

He snorted. "Call me Jasper, dear. And yes, you're right about that. The damnedest feeling came over me just now. Like seeing a celebrity in the grocery store and mistaking them for a friend just because they're familiar."

Elena cocked her head to the side. "I guess that's… flattering?"

"It's downright uncanny." He sliced the air dismissively. "I've become acquainted with a hell of a lot of versions of you. Bonnie's loyal best friend, Damon's wild girlfriend, Stefan's compassionate first love, Jeremy's protective sister, Caroline's… whatever you are to Caroline. But now I wonder—who is Elena to herself? So perhaps we'll get to know each other today."

"Well," she eased into the room, sat herself down on the loveseat. She felt a bit like she'd shown up for a job interview and been told the interviewer wanted to be friends. So it irritated her, how pointedly calm he seemed. She contained it. Folded her hands uncomfortably in her lap. "I suppose that's… basically what I'm here for. Since it seems I need your approval to be allowedto carry this baby. For Bonnie."

He raised a brow. "You need Damon's permission. It's his child. And you'd have to be sleep-cursed a hell of a lot longer before you could seriously believe that I or anyone could force Damon to give it if he doesn't want to." He shook his head. "If you think you're here for my permission, you can have it. You're of legal age. Just know that it won't take you very far."

She pressed her hands together. Looked down at them, up at him. "I think I have Damon's permission," she said slowly.

"Ah. That _was_ you listening to him with Bonnie, then."

So much for the hope he hadn't heard. "Umm. I didn't really mean to. At first. But… yeah." Elena drew in a breath, trying not to think about the the other person who most certainly heard her crying in the hall. "It was."

"I see."

Elena looked at her hands again, made a show of studying her fingernails. Why was this so awkward? Wasn't he supposed to be asking her questions? _What did it feel like to hear your boyfriend tell your best friend that he's sorry he didn't stop loving you sooner?_ Right. Vicious thought. She tried to shove it aside, too. Why did so many of her thoughts, lately, feel like they were like heavy furniture she couldn't move anymore? She blinked back the tears that sprang back into her eyes fiercely. _Not here, Elena._

When she finished pretending to examine her own hands, she saw that Jasper had opened his book back up and returned to his reading. "Aren't you… supposed to be asking me questions?" she asked, aloud this time.

Jasper looked up in surprise. "I thought you came here for my blessing of your plans. I gave it."

"I thought you were… a therapist or something."

"Yes. Both, actually." At Elena's blank look, he elaborated. "A therapist and 'or something.' I have two doctorates, one in medicine and one in psychology. But you should know that they were granted about sixty years ago from the University of California at Berkeley, so they're as crusty as I am. And I'm unlicensed here in the state of Virginia. Even my Oregon and California licenses have been lapsed for longer than you were sleep-cursed." He grinned now, and she was surprised by how white his teeth were, almost as white as his beard. Another advantage of becoming a vampire, she figured. "Turns out you don't really need a license to practice on vampires and their friends. But all that is really beside the point."

"Which is?"

"Which is that it didn't take me fifty years of practice to learn that you can't work with a person who won't work. I may talk to myself sometimes, but I don't call it teaching."

Now it was her turn to respond meditatively. "I see." But then she realized that she didn't. "So. I'm… hopeless?"

Now Jasper tucked his bookmark back into his book more slowly, but also more finally. "Well, since you suggested it," Jasper ventured easily, maybe a little too easily, "I think I will ask just one question. If you're willing."

Elena felt again the heaviness of thoughts crashing in at her center, all disorganized and jumbled, all hard to push apart. She nodded, just once, very slowly, left her chin low to watch him. "Did you just reverse psychology me like we were out on the playground?"

He ignored her even as she heard how ridiculous she sounded. "My question is, what do you think you did to earn the Salvatore brothers' love?"

 _Nothing._

Elena's fingernails dug hard into her palms.

 _What do you see, what do you see, what do you see?_ "What do you… mean?"

"I mean, why do you think they loved you? Either of them, or both. You choose."

 _You choose._ God, she hated those words. So she followed her favorite star and didn't. "I… I was kind to them. I believed in them." She cleared her throat as truer answers tried to form there. Swallowed them. "They thought they were… evil, broken. I reminded them that they could be… good."

"You think Stefan, when you first met him, needed a reminder that he could be good?"

"I… well… no. Not exactly." This was a safer question; this was about Stefan, about what she thought he'd seen in _himself_. She could answer this one. "He was determined to be good. It was all he thought about. It was a paradox, you know. It was important to him that he was better than Damon. And he was, actually. He was better, kinder, wiser, more… ethical. More compassionate. But he also thought vampires were bad in their nature. And he thought that Damon was actually right to hate him because of all his old sins."

"And was Damon right to hate him?"

"No." Elena didn't hesitate. "He was… Damon must have had some kind of disease. One of those fixation disorders Stefan said you deal with. He got stuck in some of his feelings. He… he does that…" She trailed off uncertainly.

"You mean like his love for Katherine Pierce?"

"Yes." Elena could be safe here, again. "You don't love _or_ hate someone for a hundred and fifty years without seeing them, without some serious devotion."

"I suppose not. Is that what you saw in Damon, Elena? His capacity for…fixation?"

"Sure. He loved Katherine for so long. I thought…" She trailed off again, this time more tellingly. _Damn it._ But she could hear Stefan, saying to her, _just be honest with Jasper, please_ , and this much honesty seemed basically harmless. She was entitled to this feeling, wasn't she? Not like the others. "Well, OK," she said slowly. "So—yes. I thought his feelings would last the sixty years I expected to be asleep. Rather than six years. Or maybe less."

"You feel rejected."

"No. I was rejected. While I was basically in a coma."

Jasper didn't argue the point, and Elena felt it sink into her stomach. "But if I'd asked you—before your, errr, your coma—why Damon loved you?" Jasper leaned forward just slightly, seemed to catch himself, and leaned back. Dropped his shoulders. "What do you think you might have said?"

"I would have said that he… well, that he needed me to remind him of the man he'd once wanted to be. That he could be that man still. That he was worthy of love."

"So he didn't love you."

"I didn't say that."

"You said he needed you to love him so he could meet his own goals. Which is different from loving you. Isn't it?"

"It… no. He loved me. He did."

"OK." For his even tone and clear blue eyes, she would have thought he believed her, but since she suspected he shouldn't, she also believed he didn't. Especially after his next question. "So how did you know?"

She scrambled for a defense. "He fought for me. Traveled through _time_ for me. Wouldn't let go even when I didn't remember him—but did let go when he thought my feelings were just on account of the sire bond—put his life on the line for me on the Island, in the cemetery, and when Katherine came after me, and when Klaus did." Elena took a breath. "He helped my friends. Forgave Stefan. He… became better."

"And that was all for you?"

Elena swallowed. _Not really._ "He thought it was."

"Hmm." It was disquieting, that Jasper seemed to hear what she didn't say as much as what she did. "Is that why you loved him?"

"Because he… changed?" Elena bit her lip.

"Because he fought for you _and_ changed for you."

"I loved him for himself." Elena didn't hear herself speak in past tense. "Just for—everything he is. Before he changed. And after."

"Ah. And what Damon _is,_ that's better than what Stefan _is_ , and that's how you chose between them?"

Elena frowned. "Well, no. Neither one of them is _better_ than…" She sighed. "Is it always like this, talking to you? You just… make everything about something that it's not?"

Jasper turned to reach for the notebook he had tossed onto his desk. Consulted it a moment, scrawled a couple of words only. "Maybe it doesn't seem like it, but I prefer to say what I mean, Ms. Gilbert. Here it is. I believe that relationships are, in a word, relational. What I am trying to encourage you to consider is that you loved Damon not only in himself, but for what he gave _you_ that you didn't have, and that Stefan couldn't, or wouldn't, give you, that Matt didn't. Just as you can already see that he loved you in part for what you gave him—a better self-image, a reason to be the man he wanted to be."

"That… makes sense, actually." Elena thought for a moment about what he'd asked before. _Why did I—I mean, why do I—love Damon?_ "I feel like… everyone thinks that I loved him because he protected me. To the exclusion of every other goal. And because he didn't care about anyone else. Not really."

Jasper's brows shot up. "Is that what you really wanted?"

 _Yes._ Elena heard the echo of what Iris had levelled at her drunkenly the night before. _You just want, and want, and want…_ "That would make me pretty needy," she said flatly, "to love someone so I could be the only star in their goddamned universe."

"Wanting unconditional love is not typically considered a psychological disorder. It's rather the human condition," Jasper said carefully.

Elena sighed. His manipulations seemed so transparent. She'd known for a long time that Stefan and Damon, their impossible strength, their comforting immortality, had spoken to the orphan in her. Especially when they'd professed to love her. Still. "They didn't replace my parents." Just saying it left a bad taste in her mouth, and smell in her nose.

"I don't believe any of your feelings, even for your parents themselves, are as simple as you're accusing me of suggesting," Jasper said firmly. "Listen to me. I think I should speak plainly, because you seem to believe I'm asking you questions even though I already have the answers, answers you also think are wrong. I don't have answers. Not yet. Think of your life as a play, Ms. Gilbert. If I know certain things about it, it's because I've been to this theater before, and I know the stage. And I've seen some of the major players in your life in… other works. But still. You have the script. It is your story. Anything could happen here."

"You say that, but deep down you think you understand what's wrong with me better than I do," Elena said softly. "You think I'm a poor little broken orphan girl you can fix." _Does he?_ she wondered, thinking bitterly that she didn't understand herself anymore. And then, some quieter, feebler voice, who lived somewhere darker: _Can he?_

"No. You can accuse me of many unsavory intentions, Ms. Gilbert. I'm no saint, and God knows I have my own vices. But not that." He cleared his throat, thought a moment. "Mainly because it doesn't square up with how I see my own profession. A diagnosis, even an accurate one, doesn't fix anything in and of itself. And I don't yet have one. Still, perhaps… perhaps you'll let me tell you about the way, ahem, the way plays like yours are typically… staged and set. But don't mistake me. This won't be a script. Any more than a diagnosis is a cure."

"Fine. Try me," Elena gritted. He would probably miss all the points, which would be fine with her. Then she could walk out and face Stefan and Damon with a clean conscience. And if he didn't then, well, why not have just one person tell her that he _knew_ she was a failure, and finally hold her accountable? Hadn't she been waiting for just this? Maybe it would be a relief.

This was a familiar feeling, not knowing quite what to hope for, but hoping nonetheless to somehow get _caught_. That feeling felt like home, as much of a home as she still had.

Jasper leaned forward onto his own knees, staring at her with unflinching blue eyes under his bushy white brows, a look somewhere between a glare and a compulsion stare. "Someone in your situation might, for starters, have what are popularly called 'abandonment issues.' An imprecise term, and not one that I myself favor. The term masks a whole cluster of competing symptoms, including self-abnegation, anxiety, depression. Associated use of sex or chemicals or seeking out of dangerous activities, all of which function as distraction from pain, and hence are self-soothing. Very relatedly, abandoned people often suffer from an incapacity to think concretely about the future. And, oh, what else, let's see. Well. People who've been abandoned, particularly by their parents—"

Elena held up both hands. She had disagreed with his premise all along. "I don't have any of that. They didn't abandon me."

Jasper ran a quick hand over his beard, at that; it struck her a show of surprise. "Didn't your father ask Stefan to save you and not him or your mother?"

"Yes. He saved my life."

"And you've never felt that he abandoned you to life and went on to death without you?"

Elena reared back at that, feeling like he had just pressed hard on some button deep inside her that no one had ever touched. Her mouth fell open, ready for words that wouldn't emerge.

But Jasper didn't need an answer.

"Not to mention that your biological parents gave you up at birth, and then each of them failed to protect you, quite willfully, at crucial moments. And of course, Stefan, who you thought was your soulmate, left you to save Damon, and left himself in the process. Abandoned you so thoroughly he literally almost killed you. We'll leave aside Jenna. Jeremy. Ric. For the time being, anyway. Because now Bonnie and Damon have also—"

"OK!" she held up her hands, waved them back and forth across her chest almost frantically. "Alright. Alright. OK." She felt the water flooding into her brain, her lungs, drowning rational thoughts, and struggled to take deep, steadying breaths again.

Jasper seemed to find it better not to leave her there, but seeing she now understood him, instead kept going. "Like I was saying. People who've been abandoned," he emphasized those words softly, "are often attracted to certainty, and hence to authoritarianism; for some people it's religious or political, but around here I'd think it could manifest in attraction to superhuman near-immortal beings. Certainty is so important that, in moments of indecision, the person often gets unreasonably attached to the first solution she hears, even when better options come along."

Elena had squeezed her eyes shut; she could barely hear him now over the tidal pulsing of blood in her ears. "And I should say that it would be quite typical if such a person both had unreasonably high expectations for her lovers, and also felt deeply unworthy of their love. Like she needed them to prove that she was wrong in her belief that there were good reasons in her character as to why she deserved to be abandoned. Such a person would tend to believe that she was a failure, guilty of not having prevented her own abandonment. That's a form of self-hatred, of course." Jasper sounded, and looked tense, like he would rather not be saying what he was saying. "And… one final thing. Forgive me, but such a person's survival instinct is often… unreliable."

Elena, who was outright trembling now, to hear all of this plainly stated, fought the quaver that came in her voice, but couldn't face the fear or the anger that came before it. Those were still clear in her question. "Unreliable?" she managed.

"If I had offered you a choice between answering my question about why the Salvatore brothers loved you, and cliff diving, which would you have chosen?"

Elena's eyes flashed yellow light at him for a moment. "Depends on the cliff."

"The reason is that self-loathing—the sense of being unworthy of the regard of others—tends to activate our survival instinct. Whenever we brush up against that feeling that we're unworthy, our survival instinct says to us, 'don't touch it. If you do, it'll swallow you up and you'll quite simply die. Look away so you can survive.' Do you need a moment, Ms. Gilbert?"

"No," Elena gritted. She needed a hundred. And she didn't want to need anything from this man. "Just—go on."

"Very well. When you obey and look away, you tend to look in the _opposite_ direction—to things which make you feel alive, those self-soothing things I mentioned before. Things like sex, intense love, drugs, adventure, rebellion. You wanted to run when I asked my question _because_ you want to live, even if the running is actually much more dangerous." He paused, saw the way her throat was working, the hand she had pressed against it, where air once hadn't come, where vampire bites had... "Am I striking a chord or missing the point, Ms. Gilbert?"

She shook her head. Angrily, again. He knew he'd hit several nails on the head, had actually pounded on some of them. "Don't play games with me."

"I don't think your life is a game, Ms. Gilbert." He stroked the cover of his book thoughtfully a moment. "But I think maybe you've been treating it as one for a long time. Hide and seek, to be precise. Mostly hide. When all of that—looking away—that I mentioned happens continually, it tends to seal up the feelings that drive it. And that unworthiness grows and festers and takes over more and more of your sense of self. Elena," his voice gentled, "I have been worried about you from the first story I heard about you. You think the rest of us were at war. But what, I have often wondered, must your dreams have been like?"

She blew out her breath at that.

Fine, then. He'd seen.

Was forgiveness really possible, after all that? She didn't want to let herself hope. That would be the cruelest of all. Or… was it forgiveness she wanted, or something else?

 _Just try to tell Jasper the truth,_ Stefan had said. _Please,_ he had said.

 _Honey,_ he had said _._

"They were lonely," she said softly. She drew in a deep breath. Said the rest. "My dreams. They were lonely. Because… everyone kept leaving me."

Jasper shoulders squared, at that, as though tensing against slumping at a blow. His ice-blue eyes, though, went liquid. "I guess they did," he said gently.

She couldn't bear those eyes on her, the pity she sensed in them. She didn't deserve it. She knew she didn't.

Still, there was that small voice in her clawing up out of the darkness, the one that had heard what Stefan had asked her to do, the one trusted Stefan without any reservations at all. "He said… Stefan said you saved his life," that voice managed to speak to the air. Elena braced herself. Whether against the idea that Stefan might not have been saved or that she herself might be, she wasn't sure. Both were unbearable.

"He saved his own life," Jasper said mildly. "I went along with him."

"And now… you're gonna tell me how to do it."

Elena felt like she'd just signed a confession in blood. Like she'd said something momentous.

Jasper didn't blink.

"No. I'm going to ask _you_ to tell _me_ what _you're going to do_. While you rethink what's happened. Because history isn't destiny, Elena." He tilted his head toward the window, where a day that had started out sunny was starting to seem overcast, to look like it might all end in a downpour. "Look out there. Something's coming. Something always does. But then it'll go. Like I said before, people in your situation often struggle to imagine the future. They see a perpetual storm or a permanent holiday. Or sometimes that manifests itself in total blankness, an unwillingness to make solid plans. They speak in unrealistic ways—they say 'never' and 'forever' instead of 'last month' and 'next year.' Among immortals, I think, it can be especially hard to realize that that way of thinking might be a manifestation of a death wish. A desire to live outside of real time. And that's why I think your course of treatment has to involve not only rethinking your past, but especially your future. This time, with specificity. Clarity. Goals. Timelines."

There were parts of Elena's chest cavity that felt like they were getting air for the first time in her adult life, now. "You want me to make a plan for my life. My real life."

God. What a thought. That seemed both… Elena struggled to figure out how it felt. _Impossible. And exciting._

Jasper smiled now. "Yes. You're a remarkable young person, with a lot of talents and a lot of years ahead of you. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be, outside of your friends and loved ones, just—for yourself?"

She held his eyes now like a cat holds one—blinking, to show trust, but not seeming to be able to look away. "I have absolutely no idea," she admitted finally, and looked away for not finding answers in his face. "I used to want to be a writer, but… I haven't thought about doing something, you know, something outside Mystic Falls, in a long, long time. The things that have happened to me… I can't write about them." She took a deep breath, then gave in to cowardice and deflected. "What did you want to be? When you were my age?"

Jasper's smile widened. "When I was your age, young lady, Jack Kennedy was president and every other day seemed like it might bring nuclear war. But I was a young idiot, and all I wanted was to play professional baseball. Could barely think about anything else. It was all I did—played baseball, read about it, listened to it on the radio, talked about it with friends, even as they all came and went from Vietnam."

Elena blinked hard, at that. "So…. what happened?"

"Nothing. I wasn't very good at fielding. And to be honest, even though I still love it just as much, I found watching regular old baseball pretty boring once the intensity faded away. I haven't even followed the Giants—that's my team—since the eighties."

"Huh." She could barely imagine that—imagine letting go of things she had loved and letting them change while she wasn't looking. _Who are you holding onto them for?_ There was that feeling of her mother's hand on her shoulder, again. "Well. That's a long time," she murmured.

"Yes, my dear. It is. Very long." He tapped the cover of his book emphatically. "Now leave me to finish with this nonsense. I'll see you again on Thursday morning and you'll tell me what you used to write. What movies you like and don't like. What you haven't read yet." He gestured to the rows and rows of books on the shelves behind her. "What you might or might not get out of a college degree."

"Alright." She paused in the doorway, felt awkward, turned back. "And I guess… we'll talk about everything else, too?" _Bonnie, and Damon. And Stefan. Stefan and Caroline._ Her heart skipped a beat, but though she couldn't quite say aloud what she meant, her brain was on a runaway train with it all, now. _And Jeremy, and his daughter, and my parents and, God, my other parents, and Aunt Jenna, and the sleep curse and the Pegacite curse and… all those years of dreams, the way everyone seemed to keep disappearing, over and over and over._

Maybe Jasper knew what she meant; he must have known some of it. And he definitely heard the low, warning dread in her tone. "I've got an eternity ahead of me, my dear. We've time enough for all that and a cup of tea. Maybe we'll even take in a Giants game. I've got a hankering, just lately, to turn a game back on. Just to see how it's all going these days."

The crack of laughter that burst out of Elena's mouth should have split the room wide open. Had she ever heard a more ridiculous plan? An afternoon someday this summer, once it was baseball season, when she might or might not still be in this plane of reality, and she'd spend it just sitting and watching baseball with an old newly-turned vampire who wouldn't know any of the players any more than she did.

She laughed, grabbed the doorframe and laughed harder, and noted as she did that the thought of it made her feel wildly, unexpectedly free. She thought of her dad, of hearing him explain his preferences for this pitcher over that one, holding forth about the invalidity of designated hitting. And shook her head. Still smiling. "Well. We'll see," she said, not withholding the sound of her reservations. "I'll… I guess I'll see you Thursday."

"So you will."

When he heard her hit the front door, he picked up his pen and began scribbling impressions, ideas, and treatment goals on the pad in front of him. Fifteen minutes later found his pen hovering over where he'd underlined one word. _Self-destructive._

"That could have gone worse," he mumbled to himself. He was worn out; he usually liked to let the patients do most of the talking, but it was his hunch that Elena had pushed her feelings down for so long she couldn't reach them by herself. So it had felt like he'd been whispering a song to a venomous snake, which would kill him if it fell asleep and kill him if it suddenly woke up all the way. He'd done it, though, and he could understand a bit more now about the woman he had heard about at such great length for so many years. Not what he expected; she was actually closer to understanding herself than he would have thought possible, for one thing, given that she'd spent years tumbling over cliffs and then turning around to pull friends off their own crumbling ledges. A terrible cycle, that. You needed solid ground and a bit of time to get a real grip on anything at all. "Well. It may still."

He turned back to his Twain. What was it the man had said? Oh, yes. _A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something useful that can never grow dim or doubtful._ He'd learn what the Salvatores had, then. Bright and clear.

Though Elena wasn't a cat—more like half-dove, half-lion—Jasper figured he'd seen enough of her scratches in the furniture of this town to know he wouldn't be spared.

He thought of Stefan, this morning, his head hung low. _I'm still in love with her_ , he had said. Jasper's heart had slumped like Stefan's shoulders. It would be hard, maybe impossible, for Stefan to keep his distance. But Stefan knew it, just like Jasper did: probably the last thing Elena needed at this moment was to be saved by a man's love. She needed to find a reason to live within her own life.

 _Good thing I spent a lot of years working on his resilience,_ he thought.

And he thumbed to the next page, wishing for Stefan's sake that the dark days ahead of him were already contained in a good book.


End file.
